Spanish and Latin American memory novels

The contemporary recuperation of the dark memory of civil wars and dictatorial pasts has led to a considerable alteration of the realist novel in the Spanish-speaking world. The memory of past violence and atrocity is a topic capable of arousing strong emotions and ethical engagement, and the sub-genre of the memory novel has emerged as one of the most popular in Spain as well as in Latin America. This new realist novel dedicated to the memory of violent pasts is characterized by its social commitment to pay tribute to the victims of repression and by the inclusion of non-fictional elements (docufiction, autofiction, novel without fiction, etc.), but there are also differences. This article takes its point of departure in the description of the Spanish memory novel as it has emerged since the turn of the century, with the aim of comparing its defining traits to the Latin American novel, primarily in relation to the concept of trauma. A hypothesis governing the article is that the Spanish memory novel is primarily oriented towards the cognitive creation of knowledge and truth authentication of the past, and uses emotion as a way to arouse compassion. The Latin American memory novel, on the other hand, mostly follows the narrative template of trauma literature in order to represent what is not expressible: the memory of the horrific experience itself. The article discusses how and to what extent differences in the memory cultures involved might explain such differences in the form of the novel.