History, Memory, Television

Historical memory remains inescapable in both Spanish politics and Hispanist scholarship. While it is thus appropriate that the topic should be addressed in this first chapter, the debate seems to have taken a new turn. Against the “pact of oblivion” hypothesis frequently accepted in Spain and abroad, Jo Labanyi has written, first, that the transition to democracy was based not on willful amnesia but on a negotiated refusal to let the past determine the future (“Memory” 93); and, more recently, that a failure to speak about that past, where it existed, may have been based not on forgetfulness but on a tactical silence: the conscious refusal of individuals to risk harm to family and friends by passing on memories that could prove dangerous to them (“Introduction” 123).

Similarly, Ángel Loureiro, writing like Labanyi in the context of film, has also called attention to the large volume of accounts of the Civil War and the Francoist regime which appeared after the death of the Dictator. As Loureiro writes, this is a body of work that is also impossible to square with the supposed “pact of oblivion,” a term that was coined years after the fact. Loureiro goes on:

It is symptomatic of this conflict that a recent volume on The Politics and Memory of Democratic Transition, whose contributors are mainly political scientists, pays attention throughout not to the supposed silences or failures of the process, argued by humanities scholars, but rather to the success with which the “Spanish model” was exported to other countries (Alonso and Muro passim).

Foucault wrote famously at the start of his history of sexuality: “The question I would like to pose is not, Why are we repressed? but rather why do we say with so much passion and so much resentment … that we are repressed?”