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Abstract
Since the end of the 1990s, more and more Spanish comics have focused on the recent Spanish past, including the memory of the Civil War (1936-1939) and the succeeding dictatorship. This article offers an analysis of a particular comics volume, Cuerda de presas (2005) by Jorge García and Fidel Martínez, and discusses the way in which it interprets the role of the past in Spanish society thirty years after the political transition to democracy. I argue that Cuerda de presas participates in the questioning of the dominant memory about the past. It does this by undermining narrative coherence and by pointing to the plural and unstable characteristics of memories. Charles Peirce's semiotics constitutes the framework for the analysis, according to which there is a dynamic relationship between Cuerda de presas and Spanish society.
Keywords: diagrammatic signs, dictatorship, identity, narrative, semiotics, Spanish history
Cuerda de presas is a series of short stories about women in Spanish prisons in the years after the end of the Civil War (1936-1939).1 The stories show the brutality of the repression in the post-war years and offer examples of how the women who survived try to tackle the memories almost sixty years later during the 2000s. The stories include many traces of Spain, past and present, and with their focus on remembering the Francoist repression they explicitly relate to the very lively public memory debate that was at its peak in Spanish society around the time of the album's publication in 2005.
The recent Spanish past includes a civil war and a dictatorship of almost forty years that ended in the mid-1970s with dictator Francisco Franco's death and the transition to democracy. After a failed military coup in 1981, Spanish society was on a fast track to becoming part of the European community, both literally, with its membership in the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1986, and in a general sense, as a modern, democratic social state. An amnesty law from 1977 made it impossible to prosecute anybody for crimes committed during the Francoist dictatorship, and the dominant memory of the past became a narrative that focused on the fact that the only real villain, Franco, had died and that more or less everybody else was in favour of...