Literature and the Dictatorship. Historiographic Metafiction in Antonio Muñoz Molina´s A Manuscript of Ashes

The human rights are always violated during the dictatorship. The trauma of non-democratic regimens always has its repercussion into generations of writers. The paper examines A Manuscript of Ashes of Muñoz Molina; a novel based in Franco’s Spain, published in 1986. Young Antonio Muñoz Molina is reinterpreting in a postmodern way the history of his region. He is working a social trauma of dictatorship by showing the alternative versions of the history and the impossibility to reach the truth. The author needs to fictionalize the history, feeling that what happened in Franco’s Spain was possible to be told only as literature, as a fiction. The novel describes the civic war, post-war years when the republicans were still being pursued by the government and the 60’, during the students strikes. But there isno direct reference to any historical fact of this period. All the protagonists are fictional. The novel is a postmodern try of questioning the official version of the history, which makes it a perfect example of historiographic metafiction, a concept developed by Linda Hutcheon as one of the characteristics of a postmodern novel. The novel, with full conscience of the impossibility of the reconstruction of the past and through the subjective narrative voice is discovering a new truth. New, but not the only one, nor the final one.