Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1463-6204 (Print) 1469-9818 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20

Memoria de la melancolía by María teresa león:

The performativity and disidentification of exilic
memories

Ofelia Ferrán

To cite this article: Ofelia Ferrán (2005) Memoria�de�la�melancolía�by María teresa león: The
performativity and disidentification of exilic memories, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 6:1,
59-78, DOI: 10.1080/1463620042000336910

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1463620042000336910

Published online: 17 Aug 2006.

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Ofelia Ferrán

MEMORIA DE LA MELANCOLÍA BY
MARÍA TERESA LEÓN: THE
PERFORMATIVITY AND
DISIDENTIFICATION OF EXILIC
MEMORIES

The novel begins by presuming a verbal and semantic decentering of the ideological world,
a certain linguistic homelessness of literary consciousness.
M.M. Bakhtin. The Dialogic Imagination

Quitar al exilio republicano toda la ganga mitificadora que lo ha ido recubriendo a lo

largo de los años y a la vez incorporar nuevas perspectivas temáticas y crı́ticas, esto es para
mı´ dialogizar el exilio.
Franciso Caudet. Hipótesis sobre el exilio republicano de 1939

There is an interesting web site, entitled ‘‘Portal del exilio,’’ dedicated to

remembering the Spanish Republican exile(s) of 1939. Within the web site, under
the category ‘‘Exposiciones,’’ there is a link to an exhibit entitled ‘‘Exilio’’ which
presents a series of sections with images of the different chronological stages of the
Republican exile(s), the last being: ‘‘los retornos’’.1 Here, among photographs of
other illustrious figures returning from exile in the seventies, there is one of poet
Rafael Alberti descending from the plane, face smiling, hand waving to all who
greeted his return in 1977 after 38 long years of absence from Spain. I came across
this web site after I had been steeped in readings about Alberti’s wife, Marı́a Teresa
León, for a long time, and thus after having read over and over again about this
moment of their return together to Spain. My initial reaction to the picture was
therefore quite strong, and a certain misrecognition came over me: ‘‘this isn’t right,
where is León?’’ For, although she arrived on that same plane with Alberti in 1977,
she is strikingly absent from the picture, even from its caption. Present at the time,
absent in the present. Her presence/absence haunts that picture, which thus turns her
into a ghost, hovering just beyond the edge of the picture, the edge of the visible.
After my initial reaction, I realized that this experience was in fact quite revealing.
First of all, it is symptomatic of the gaps in any and all practices that pretend to
recover or represent the past, even those that pretend to fill in the gaps of earlier
historical narratives. Historical memory is inevitably connected to historical
forgetting. In this case, the web page purposefully presents information about the
experience of exile that had been repressively silenced during the Franco regime and

Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies Vol. 6, No. 1 March 2005, pp. 59
/78
ISSN 1463-6204 print/ISSN 1469-9818 online – 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1463620042000336910
60 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

then, to a large degree, sidestepped during the ‘‘pact of amnesia’’ that conveniently
emerged during the transition to democracy.2 It should be noted that the singular
term ‘‘exilio’’ of the web page is symptomatic in itself of a problematically simplified
view of a historical experience that was not the same for all who suffered exile. This
difference is fundamental to keep in mind when analyzing this historical experience.3
Of course, that the woman was left ‘‘out of the picture,’’ quite literally, is no
surprise, since those gaps, silences, and omissions in representation are more often
than not gendered, being produced around, and at the same time producing, woman’s
invisibility. Furthermore, Marı́a Teresa León’s ghostly presence/absence in the
picture could be seen as an extension of an important aspect of her own writing in her
autobiography Memoria de la melancolı́a (1970), traversed as it is, haunted throughout,
by the memories of so many fellow compatriots that exile seemed to have relegated to
the category of ghosts, of living-dead. Moreover, my sense of misrecognition upon
beholding the picture can also be seen to echo another prevailing aspect of her text,
the misrecognition, or ‘‘disidentification,’’ that I will analyze as being central to
León’s autobiography, and to the multiple levels of exile reflected therein.
Finally, a picture such as this one which, still today, presents an image of exile in
which key players are erased from memory raises important questions as to what our
task as scholars of the Republican exile(s) of 1939 should be. Is it enough to
understand our task as one of ‘‘broadening the picture,’’ enlarging the frame, so to
speak, in order to recover texts and characters from the oblivion and silence to which
they have been reduced by being positioned beyond the edge of that all-powerful
‘‘frame’’ called the canon? This is, indeed, an important task, and still much needs to
be done in this respect.4
But we cannot assume that such a task is the only one to be undertaken, or even
that it is clear what it means to adequately ‘‘recover’’ such material form oblivion and
neglect. Mari Paz Balibrea’s proposal in ‘‘El paradigma exilio’’ opens up a very
suggestive course of analysis, recognizing that, in this process of ‘‘recovering’’ the
formerly excluded bibliography of the 1939 exile(s), ‘‘lo que falta abrumadoramente
es el sitio donde ubicarla.’’ That is, we cannot simply pretend to ‘‘enlarge’’ the canon
to include previously excluded material, without critically exploring the dynamics
underlying that very process of canon formation, inextricably related to the dynamics
of nation formation, and without recognizing, furthermore, that the very writing of
many of those texts from exile radically calls into question, destabilizes, such
dynamics. Instead of trying to ‘‘stabilize’’ the position of such texts within the history
of contemporary Spanish literature by simply incorporating them, we should perhaps
learn to assume, within our very manner of approaching them, the ‘‘destabilizations’’
that they often embody. As Balibrea states: ‘‘esa desestabilización debe inscribirse en
la crı́tica misma que busca relacionar la cultura del exilio con la del interior. [. . .]
Antes de recuperar de forma duradera el exilio, su crı́tica deberá demostrar cómo esta
literatura saca de quicio a España, dinamitando su canon y sus presupuestos polı́tico-
narrativos.’’
I believe that two of the issues mentioned above which I will analyze in Memoria de
la melancolı́a may lead in this direction. The ghostly presences that haunt León’s text,
as well as her own ghostly absence/presence in the picture on the web, can be
examined within a ‘‘philosophy of the phantasm’’ which, as Joan Ramon Resina
explains, following Foucault, is a critical practice that ‘‘call[s] into question the cozy
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 61

categories of modern thought: body, state, reason, image, inside and outside, the
imaginary’’ (3). Furthermore, the ‘‘disidentification’’ characterizing much of León’s
narrative, with the fragmented and disjointed construction of self it develops, could
be seen as one element that may productively ‘‘destabilize’’ our own critical
engagement with her text, as well as with other exilic memoirs and autobiographies, if
such a ‘‘disidentification’’ is strategically appropriated as a critical tool in itself.
Finally, I want to underscore another element of León’s memoirs that has been
mentioned in previous studies, but that I believe has not been sufficiently analyzed,
and which will be seen to be inextricably related to the previous two issues: the
influence on her narrative of León’s work in, and passion for, theater. This leads to a
constant highlighting of the performativity and thus instability of any and all identities
in her writing.
The foregrounding of theater and all things theatrical, as well as of the
performative nature of identity and politics in Memoria de la melancolı́a, (written in the
1960’s during León’s exile in Rome and published in 1970 in Argentina) is not
surprising, given the great passion and devotion León had for the theater. Much of her
political activism before and during the civil war was tied to theater projects, and,
aside from the novels and collections of short stories she published in her lifetime, she
wrote several plays and articles dealing with theater.5 Performance and performativity
will, indeed, be inextricably related to León’s representation of the various levels of
exile she suffered throughout her life, and of the dynamics of gender underlying such
exiles.
León was born in 1903, in Logroño, and spent her childhood moving from city to
city, living in Logroño, Madrid, Burgos, and Barcelona. Her father, in the military,
and her mother, from an aristocratic family, imposed a conservative education on
León, one destined to prepare the young girl for a quiet life as part of the Spanish
upper class. She married at a young age and had two children, but finally, resisting
much family and social pressure to remain married, she divorced her husband and
concomitantly lost her rights over her two young sons. Later, she met and married
Rafael Alberti and began an indefatigable trajectory of political activism, heavily
marked by the couple’s membership in the Spanish Communist Party.
Many of the projects León undertook reflected her interest in theater. Before the
war, for example, she participated in the Misiones Pedagógicas, a project with an
educational goal similar to Lorca’s ‘‘La Barraca’’ which represented well-known
Spanish plays in rural villages. León and Alberti received a grant from the Republic’s
Junta de Ampliación de Estudios to study European theater, and thus they both
traveled throughout Europe in 1932, bringing back to Spain a new perspective on the
importance of politically engaged theater. They later attended the I Congreso de
Escritores Soviéticos in Moscow in 1934 and returned there in 1937. During the war,
León and Alberti helped found and run the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas,
which coordinated much of the support that intellectuals from all over the world came
to offer the Spanish Republic. Within that institution, León directed the Comité
de Agitación y Propaganda Interior. As part of this project, she created and was the
director of the Guerrillas del Teatro, a theatrical troop in charge of taking theater
representations to the war front, as well as of Nueva Escena, the theater section of
the Alianza. Here, she created the Escuela Técnica Teatral, which organized courses
on different aspects of theater, such as directing, acting, etc. León was named
62 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

vice-president of the Republic’s Consejo Central del Teatro (the president was
Antonio Machado), and she was named director of Teatro de Arte y Propaganda. In
this capacity she was in charge of directing numerous plays. She was also active in the
Junta de Incautación del Tesoro Artı́stico, organizing, with Alberti, the movement to
Valencia of major works from the Prado museum during the war. Although her active
engagement in theater was much reduced in exile, her understanding of theater and of
the many theatrical elements of life is present in all of León’s writing, including
Memoria de la melancolı́a.6
In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva writes that ‘‘For those who
are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang
out of that very melancholia’’ (3). Angel Loureiro’s brilliant analysis of Memoria de la
melancolı´a, in The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain, develops
this insight. He keenly observes a significant difference between the second section of
the text (depicting the years of the Spanish civil war) and the first and third (the first
tracing León’s life before the war, and the third presenting the long years in exile).
Loureiro claims that the second section springs out of a sense of ‘‘political
melancholy,’’ as León longs for the lost homeland and political ideals of the
Republic, while the first and last hinge on what he calls a much deeper and less easily
definable ‘‘melancholy of transience’’ (94). These first and last sections frame the
incessant loss and displacement that León obsessively depicts in her text not just
within the realm of the ideological, but within a more general ‘‘theological’’
preoccupation which ‘‘has to do with time and meaning, with giving meaning to time,
with rescuing things from the destructive passage of time’’ (91). This, according to
Loureiro, is the much more terrifying sense of loss in León’s text that underlies the
more evident political loss of the civil war and experience of exile. The ruins that
León frequently mentions in her text, according to Loureiro, ‘‘dissimulate some
unspeakable, unrepresentable fear, the terror of a primary loss that León seems
reluctant to confront because its threat is more powerful than any political
oppression’’ (90).
I believe that Loureiro is quite correct in pointing to ‘‘a primary loss’’ in León’s
text, but I think that this experience cannot be understood without fully acknowl-
edging the way the text foregrounds the gendered nature of such loss, the manner in
which the problem of gender is inextricably intertwined with the problem of exile, of
the several levels of exile that traverse León’s writing.7
León’s autobiographical voice shifts throughout the text, alternating between
first, second and third person narration. This extreme division within the narrative
voice can be seen as a textual manifestation of the ‘‘disidentification’’ by means of
which, according to Teresa de Lauretis, women express the difficulty inherent in their
efforts to reconcile the images of themselves that they want to forge with the images
of femininity that patriarchal society imposes on them. Through an analysis of this
‘‘pronominal disjunction’’ in the retrospective narrative of León, it will become clear
that her remembrance recreates not only the experience of exile that the author
suffered after the civil war, but also another type of exile that emerges from the fact
of being a woman in a patriarchal society. As Felicity Nussbaum claims,
‘‘‘Disidentification’ in text or in the world may make visible the previously invisible
aspects of ideology that produce subjects, and new positions may be made available
through which change may be affected’’ (164).
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 63

Such ‘‘disidentification’’ is at the heart of how León narrates her childhood and
adolescence, and it is presented in a narrative saturated with theatrical imagery. From
the beginning, León presents the image of herself as a ‘‘Niña de militar inadaptada
siempre, no niña de provincia ni de ciudad pequeña con catedral y obispado y segunda
enseñanza’’ (73), and she does so in the third person. It is important, moreover, that
in this first description of her childhood she describes herself not so much as what she
was, but as what she was not as if to highlight her ‘‘disidentification’’ with the way of
life being imposed on her. It is interesting to note that the descriptions of the cities
and towns she lived in are presented as if they were annotations for the staging of a
play, like the one previously mentioned or: ‘‘Pueblo pequeño. Treinta mil habitantes,
catedral y cartuja’’ (84), and ‘‘Vida de una ciudad española, con catedral, arzobispo,
audiencia, gobernador civil’’ (165). In these ‘‘mises en scène’’ of her childhood, there is
an implicit acknowledgement of the way power is staged and performed in society.
The buildings mentioned serve the function of the backdrop of a stage, and they are
always those that represent patriarchal power (church, school, town hall, etc.).8
León describes, again in the third person, various aspects of her life at that time,
like the typical ‘‘paseos’’ through town, an act meant to stage, once again, a sense of
belonging to the right social class as well as to perform a correct gender identification,
a performance that the young León does not live up to perfectly: ‘‘la pasearon. [. . .]
Pareciera que la sacaban en procesión. [. . .] Y la niña sigue su paseo flanqueada por los
bigotes y las barbas, por los sombreros a la moda que su madre trajo de la capital.
[. . .] ¿No tiene tus ojos azules? No. La niña se siente humillada’’ (84
85). ‘‘La niña,’’
/

by the mere fact of not having blue eyes, is already beginning to fall short of what is
expected of her, something that caused her embarrassment at first, but that would
later become a source of pride. The ‘‘bigotes,’’ ‘‘barbas’’ and ‘‘sombreros a la moda’’
are presented as props for this performance of social exhibitionism that not only
guarantees one’s identification with the right social class and gender behavior, but that
actually creates the very identities of social class and gender one is aspiring to portray.
On a later occasion, upon her criticism of the exaggerated ostentation of a party she
attends, León recalls how her attitude marked a clear desire to transgress and rebel:
‘‘empezaba pronto su rebelión. A la niña se le iba a desarrollar junto con las trenzas un
principio de crı́tica. Esta niña terminará mal’’ (92).
These anecdotes are dialogical, as they incorporate into León’s own narrative
those other voices (‘‘Esta niña terminará mal’’) that represent the patriarchal authority
that is demanding the performance and staging of appropriate feminine behavior.9 The
threat of an inescapable and unspecified punishment for León’s incipient ‘‘rebelión’’
is, of course, one of the ways in which the patriarchal society of the time enforced
rigid gender identifications, so firmly based on a supposedly natural separation of
public (male) and private (female) spheres, as well as the cult of female domesticity
encoded in the image of the ‘‘ángel del hogar.’’ As Mary Nash explains: ‘‘Any woman
who contravened the norms of nature by adopting transgressive gender conduct was
implicitly threatened with disaster. [. . .] Transgression in this symbolical vision
opened up fearful threats of chaos, disorder and unhappiness’’ (‘‘Un/Contested
Identities’’ 30). The ‘‘stagings’’ of correct femininity, of which the ‘‘paseos’’ and the
‘‘fiestas’’ mentioned are only two examples among many in the text, clearly point to
the performativity of all gender identity, for, as Judith Butler reminds us: ‘‘The acts
by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical
64 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

contexts’’ (‘‘Performative Acts’’ 272). It is important to remember, however, that

Butler’s notion of the constituted and performative nature of gender does not mean it
is simply an ‘‘act’’ that an individual can willingly and consciously take up. The
difference between ‘‘performance’’ and ‘‘performative’’ is essential to keep in mind:

In no sense can it be concluded that the part of gender that is performed is

therefore the ‘‘truth’’ of gender; performance as bounded ‘‘act’’ is distinguished
from performativity insofar as the latter consists in a reiteration of norms which
precede, constrain, and exceed the performer and in that sense cannot be taken
as the fabrication of the performer’s ‘‘will’’ or ‘‘choice’’; further, what is
‘‘performed’’ works to conceal, if not disavow, what remains opaque,
unconscious, unperformable. The reduction of performativity to performance
would be a mistake. (Bodies 234)

If León uses the language and strategies of theater and theatricality to represent
her childhood, it is not to present gender as an ‘‘act’’ or ‘‘disguise’’ that she could
turn, or take on or off at will, but to highlight the social structures and norms that
such behavior necessarily repeated and, in doing so, upheld. The theatrical language
serves to de-naturalize, and thus question, those norms and structures, and the
performativity of individual identity is shown to be an ongoing process that is
inextricable from them.
Furthermore, by means of the dialogical nature of her narrative, León is
performing another de-naturalizing strategy that Bakhtin saw as the product of the
dialogical nature of the novel, here emerging in an autobiography: a ‘‘verbal and
semantic decentering of the ideological world,’’ leading to a ‘‘certain linguistic
homelessness of literary consciousness’’ (367). Thus, the ‘‘homelessness’’ that exile
imposes, whose terrible psychological effects León will explore and express in the
narration of her life after leaving Spain in 1939, is already at play before political exile,
in her gender ‘‘disidentification’’ with her original ‘‘home.’’10
The theatrical elements in León’s narrative bring to the fore the performativity,
and thus constructed nature, of all identity through an autobiography in which, as
Sidonie Smith explains: ‘‘the autobiographical subject finds him/herself on multiple
stages simultaneously, called to heterogeneous recitations of identity. The multiple
calls never align perfectly. Rather, they create spaces or gaps, ruptures, unstable
boundaries, incursions, excursions, limits and their transgressions’’ (‘‘Performativity’’
110). Those ‘‘multiple calls’’ of identity that ‘‘never align perfectly,’’ and that lead to
gaps and ruptures within the performance of identity, are further highlighted by León
as she thinks of the lineage she comes from. While remembering her childhood, León
also evokes her distant family past, recalling members of earlier generations of her
family that had been to Cuba and profited from the relationship of Spain with its
colonies. A contradiction emerges, one which is constant in León’s text, between
wanting to both identify and ‘‘disidentify’’ with an identity that supposedly is her own.
After evoking recurrent family conversations in which ‘‘se cruzaban las miserias
coloniales de España’’ (184), a contradictory attitude towards her family past
emerges. León at first seems to desire a continuity with that past: ‘‘La verdad es que
yo guardo con cariño dentro de mı́ tantas cosas como me transmitieron. Creo en la
cadena que nos enlaza. Creo en la canción que se teje con las canciones que llegan de
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 65

tan lejos.’’ Yet she immediately distances herself from it: ‘‘Me ha dado pena el ver que
mis recuerdos de infancia están llenos de recuerdos coloniales’’ (185).
This sadness, this sense of ‘‘homelessness’’ that a recreation of ‘‘home’’ evokes, as
León dialogically highlights the ‘‘disidentifications’’ that made up her childhood, echo
the argument made by Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty of how feminism
often deconstructs unitary and unproblematic notions of ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘belonging,’’
relying on ‘‘the tension between two specific modalities: being home and not being
home’’ (296). As they explain: ‘‘‘Being home’ refers to the place where one lives
within familiar, safe, protected boundaries; ‘not being home’ is a matter of realizing
that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific
histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within
oneself’’ (296). By bringing to the fore the constant tension between the
identifications and ‘‘disidentifications’’ upon which her identity is based, León’s
autobiography shows that not only is any stable sense of individual identity necessarily
based on strategic ‘‘exclusions of specific histories of oppression and resistance,’’ but
that a family and national identity is as well.11
León’s writing will constantly bring to light those previously hidden ‘‘histories of
oppression and resistance,’’ and the instability of point of view in her text, the
vertiginous fluctuations between first, second, and third person, is a way of making
visible, instead of repressing, the ‘‘differences even within [her]self.’’ As Sidonie
Smith explains, ‘‘this process of identification and disidentification is ongoing. As a
result there can be no fixed or essential preconstitutive identity’’ (‘‘Performativity’’
111). An ongoing process of construction of the self is what León’s autobiography
performs, and the dialogical nature of the self that is performed is one that is shot
through by multiple ideological tensions that point to a characteristic of woman’s
autobiographical writing that Shari Benstock describes as foregrounding the ‘‘fissures
of female discontinuity’’ (153). Highlighting these fissures, this discontinuity,
becomes an important political statement as it frames the process of forging an
individual self embodied by all autobiography within the social forces that mold, even
deform, the individual. León explicitly reflects on the process whereby such a multi-
dimensional self comes about:

Nos traemos adentro una carga inquietante de gustos y de gestos ajenos que se
nos van quedando enganchados. [. . .] Yo siento que me hice del roce de tanta
gente: de la monjita, de la amiga de buen gusto, del tı́o abuelo casi emparedado.
[. . .] Todos, todos. Somos lo que nos han hecho, lentamente al correr tantos
años. Cuando estamos definitivamente seguros de ser nosotros, nos morimos.
¡Qué lección de humildad! (146
147) /

We are, indeed, the product of our encounters and interactions with others. Our
most personal, supposedly intimate narration, autobiography, is thus always
comprised of a full chorus of other people’s voices. As León elsewhere states:
‘‘estamos llenos de frases ajenas’’ (185
86). For Bakhtin, as was mentioned earlier, a
/

narrative, such as this one, that foregrounds heteroglossia by highlighting the multi-
voiced nature of any individual identity ultimately serves to denaturalize the
ideological and discursive structures of power in society within which that identity
66 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

is forged by showing the cracks, the tensions in those structures, and thus, ‘‘depriving
[them] of [their] absence of conflict’’ (368).
Always willing to show the cracks and tensions within identity, León continues to
present an ongoing process of identification and ‘‘disidentification’’ while narrating
the devastating effects of her political exile from Spain after the civil war. There is no
progression in this process, there is no stage at which León leaves behind the strategy
of self-division enacted in the refraction of her self into different pronouns pretending
to reach a final point of plenitude or stability in the first person.12 After all, as León
states: ‘‘Cuando estamos definitivamente seguros de ser nosotros, nos morimos’’
(147). The divisions of her self continue to emerge as political exile imposes another
level of estrangement, creating yet again a feeling of separation from her self, from
her country, and from her fellow compatriots, all at the same time as she strives to
hold on to a feeling of connection to all three markers of identity.
At one point, for example, she splits herself in two as she wants to stop the pain
that emerges in the present when she recalls the past: ‘‘No me gusta que me hablen de
esto, calla, es demasiado triste’’ (191). There are numerous moments in her
autobiography in which León recounts the estrangement she feels, while in exile,
upon reading Spanish newspapers or talking with people still living in Spain, feeling so
connected, yet at the same time so disconnected, from that homeland for which she
fought with so much enthusiasm during the civil war:

Es como si yo no perteneciese a ese paı́s del que leo los periódicos [. . .] Siento
todo fuera de mı́, arrancado [. . .] Estoy como separada, mirándome. No
encuentro la fórmula para dialogar ni para unirme. Una muchacha se me aleja.
¿Sabe adonde va? Siento angustia. (82)13

The internal division that León feels (‘‘estoy como separada mirándome’’)
produced by the estrangement of exile is very similar to the internal division she felt
while growing up. This is why, on many occasions, like this one, in which León is
recalling the estrangement of political exile, she does so by evoking the image of
herself as a young girl, suffering from that previous experience of ‘‘exile,’’ of
‘‘disidentification,’’ from all that was supposed to be her ‘‘home.’’
Recalling exile upon exile, the memory that this text presents is one that is
forever fragmented, divided, faltering and unstable, never reaching a final point of
‘‘identification,’’ or rest. From the very first line of the text, León explicitly reflects
on this very unstable nature of her recollection: ‘‘Todos son palabras y colores dentro
de mı́ que ya no sé muy bien qué representan’’ (69); ‘‘Todo sumergido en pequeños
fragmentos que a veces no fraguan bien [. . .] las imágenes se le han desordenado,
encimándose unas a otras’’ (79); ‘‘Esto se habla con palabras sorbidas, truncadas, rotas
o interminables’’ (94). At one point, she envisions the disorder and fragmentation of
the very book of memories she is writing, as the disordered pages seem to take on a
life of their own: ‘‘Estas cuartillas que voy escribiendo se me han volado todas
dispersándose, jugando a la mala pasada de huirme. [. . .] Hoy todas se me han
dispersado con vida propia y no con la que yo les impuse al escribirlas’’ (393
394)./

The text thus reproduces in numerous ways the division, fragmentation, and
‘‘disidentification’’ that León had suffered through the various forms of exile she
experienced. In her very writing, León re-creates the experience of loss of a stable
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 67

identity, the insecurity created by a perpetual sense of non-belonging, in a process

that, like the Derridean pharmakon, proves to be both an illness and its only cure.
When talking about the pain that writing her autobiography engenders, León thinks:
‘‘Tal vez yo no deberı́a haber escrito este libro, pero escribir es mi enfermedad
incurable’’ (8).14
If writing is an illness for León, one that, as we have seen, recreates many of the
painful aspects of exile she experienced, it may perhaps also help her to overcome
them. Alongside the painful nature of re-living the internal divisions, the
‘‘disidentification’’ at the heart of her recollections, her writing also enables her to
re-create herself through the act of narration, a process which provides some sense of
empowerment, no matter how disjointed, fragmented, and unstable the self that is
being re-created may be. Pointing to such a therapeutic nature to her narrative
project, she again splits herself in two as she reflects on the very process of retelling
her life and now thinks of some of the experiences that she takes pleasure in
remembering, such as the work she undertook with the Guerrillas del Teatro during
the civil war: ‘‘Lo he contado muchas veces. Bueno, Marı́a Teresa, basta, ya lo has
contado veinte veces. Pero yo sigo porque es el regreso de la felicidad que dura un
instante. Y vuelvo a reconstruirme como hacen los niños con sus juegos de piececitas
de madera, recobrando la dulzura de jugar’’ (114).
Narrating her past is a ‘‘game,’’ ‘‘un juego,’’ by means of which León again
reconstructs herself (‘‘vuelvo a reconstruirme’’) even as the narrative she is telling is
one of her very fragmentation. This ‘‘juego’’ León evokes could be understood as a
version of what Freud called the ‘‘repetition compulsion’’ of trauma, illustrated by the
famous example of his grandson’s game of Fort-Da. The child overcomes the traumatic
anxiety produced by the mother’s departure with a game that endlessly reproduces
and then masters such absence in the form of a disappearing and reappearing toy. As
Freud explains, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the boy was overcome by the anxiety of
loss and ‘‘he compensated for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and
return of the objects within his reach’’ (14 emphasis added). In this ‘‘game,’’ the boy
overcomes a traumatic experience precisely be repeating it, and the theatrical term
Freud chooses to describe this process ‘‘staging the disappearance and return’’ is
significant. The repetition compulsion inherent in trauma is performative, as the very
action or event that caused overwhelming anxiety is performed again and again, with
the victim now at least in the active position of initiating or undertaking the game.
All of León’s autobiography could be seen as a traumatic process of ‘‘staging the
disappearance and return,’’ and what keeps disappearing is a stable, whole, and secure
sense of self.15
It should not be surprising that León often enacts this process of ‘‘staging the
disappearance and return’’ through images borrowed from theater. At one point, she
remembers the representation of the play Numancia, which Alberti had adapted from
Cervantes’s play and which León was directing during the civil war in besieged
Madrid. She recalls ‘‘Eso sı́. Muchas noches, mientras representábamos Numancia,
Marı́a Teresa León lloraba entre bastidores viendo subir a su pueblo hacia la hoguera
de la muerte común’’ (135). The boundaries of the theatrical and the real are blurred
here, as the story of Numancia, a town resisting a fierce military onslaught,
is represented during the desperate Republican defense of Madrid. Just as León
had used theatrical metaphors while narrating her childhood to show the ideological
68 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

de-centering of the subject (herself), here, in a real anecdote about her theater
experience, León presents herself as fragmented and de-centered again, not only
because the narration is in the third person, but because she presents herself ‘‘entre
bastidores,’’ that is, ‘‘behind the scenes’’ or ‘‘offstage.’’
Although it is impossible, due to lack of space, to adequately analyze here all the
examples in which León makes use of theater images as part of her performative
strategy of deconstructing a stable identity, it is important to note that such images
function at various levels of the narrative. Sometimes they work as meta-narrative
devices framing the narration itself or introducing different narrative strategies, and at
other times they are presented as historical anecdotes or as metaphors for other issues
dealt with in the text (such as war, death, or political activism).
One of the anecdotes in which León dialogically presents the experiences of
‘‘disidentification’’ during her childhood, for example, explicitly involves theater:
‘‘¿La niña, cómica? ¡Jamás! En nuestra familia todas las mujeres han sido decentes’’
(113). When León presents the story of her involvement with the Guerrillas del
Teatro during the war, she begins the section by addressing the reader: ‘‘Os lo voy a
contar’’ (112) and ends the section with the exclamation ‘‘Y aquı́ cae el telón’’ (138).
In another meta-narrative commentary, she equates the process of remembering her
friends in exile to a play they are all rehearsing together: ‘‘¿Cómo serán todos hoy?
Y si me vieran ¿cómo serı́a yo para ellos? Hemos separado los caminos. ¿Y si diera dos
palmadas? ¡Ensayo, ensayo! ¿no han leı́do en la tablilla que hay ensayo?’’ (134). León,
furthermore, is constantly equating theater with war: ‘‘En aquel teatro conocı́ el pacto
secreto que los escenarios dan a los que allı́ trabajan, pacto que se parece al que las
trincheras enseñan, pues es el del peligro común’’ (133). She further claims that, for
the members of the Guerrillas del Teatro, theater ‘‘Fue nuestra pequeña guerra’’
(112).
León repeatedly refers to the experiences she and others underwent as ‘‘roles,’’
for example in the following statement in which, as in so many cases, she talks about
herself in the third person: ‘‘Le cuesta siempre darse cuanta de que vive en la calle del
destierro [. . .] creyendo que es entonces y han distribuido mal los papeles y le han
dado por equivocación el de vieja’’ (103). She does the same thing when talking about
the particularly harsh experience of exile for women: ‘‘En esta dispersión española le
ha tocado a la mujer un papel histórico y lo ha recitado bien’’ (432). This last
statement is very important in the text, for one of the stated objectives of León’s
narrative is to recall the ‘‘papel histórico’’ that women have played during the war and
in exile, a ‘‘papel’’ that is often not a visibly heroic one, but that is made up of the
‘‘pequeñas historias’’ (118), ‘‘las no hazañas’’ (295). As León exclaims: ‘‘Algún dı́a se
contarán o cantarán las pequeñas historias, las anécdotas menudas. [. . .] Y se contará la
pequeña epopeya diaria, el heroismo minúsculo de los labios apretados de frı́o, del
hambre, de los trabajos casi increı́bles’’ (432).
In another particularly significant example, León stages a theatrical dialogue with
an unnamed interlocutor, within a theatrical setting, which is a meta-narrative
commentary on the testimonial function of her autobiography:

Nos están llamando: ¡Eh, váyase! Su papel no da para más. Salga de la escena.
Está concluyéndose el último acto. Sı́, sı́, aún puede decir un parlamento más,
pero de prisa. Retı́rese, por favor, tienen que entrar los otros. Qué insistente es
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 69

usted. ¿No ve cómo bosteza el público? Basta. ¿Por qué insiste? El quedarse es un
abuso de confianza, confianza en usted misma. Es que estoy triste. No se enfade,
ya me marcho. Pero ‘‘¿quién podrá contar esta triste historia’’ si yo no lo hago?
(325)

Loureiro accurately sees how, in this imagined dialogue, ‘‘León aptly foregrounds
her irreplaceable ethical responsibility’’ (96), which is the responsibility of giving
testimony to the tragedy of the Spanish civil war and exile that she, and so many
with her, have suffered. Loureiro highlights, furthermore, that this responsibility is
presented, due to the dialogue form, ‘‘as response to another’’ (96). This
responsibility of testimony, is, indeed, the ethical imperative behind León’s
autobiography, and the desperate need for an addressee is one of the leitmotivs of
León’s text. Yet the importance of the fact that this is presented as if León were
rehearsing a play is not underscored by Loureiro, nor does he mention the
continuation of the anecdote, which is quite significant. In this continuation, the
‘‘triste historia’’ that León is a witness to and which she must recall in the face of so
many other people’s willingness to forget, is no longer just the Spanish civil war, or
the plight of the many Spanish exiles from that war. The ‘‘triste historia’’ has now
become plural, incorporating many of the atrocities suffered by other peoples after
the Spanish civil war, in a ‘‘despreciable siglo XX de los inventos espantosos’’:

¿Piensa que me lamento porque tengo que salir de escena? No, no, es porque he
leido el diario de esta mañana y me duelen los huesos y me crujen. ¿Usted no lo
lee? [. . .] Tienen que enterarse los que no leen. [. . .] ¿Sabe lo que es el napalm y
la bomba X, y la H y la V? [. . .] Despreciable siglo XX de los inventos
espantosos. ¿Que me vaya? ¿Para que venga quién? Hable más bajito, como el
apuntador debe hacerlo. Que salga otro, ande, diga usted que si otro va a hacer el
elogio de la opresión, de la violencia. . .yo me retiro. (326)

Given the strategy of ‘‘disidentification’’ that León has consistently used in her
self-representation throughout the text, at this moment, in which she is on-stage, it is
not inappropriate to think of a similar strategy applicable specifically to acting, namely
the Brechtian style of acting characterized by the famous verfremdungseffekt,
(estrangement, or alienation, effect).16 As Richard Schechner explains: ‘‘In Brechtian
theater, the actor stands beside herself and beside the events enacted
doing and /

showing at the same time. The Brechtian performer is not lost in the role, or entirely
empathetic with the situation’’ (128). This ‘‘standing beside herself’’ and ‘‘beside the
events enacted’’ is exactly what León has been doing throughout her text, in this last
anecdote self-consciously, and literally, as a person on-stage. Furthermore, the
political implications of such an acting technique are underscored by Elizabeth Wright
as she explains the verfremdungseffekt:

It goes beyond the concept of ‘defamiliarization’: it sets up a set of social,

political and ideological interruptions that remind us that representations are not
given but produced. Contrary to popular belief, Verfremdung does not do away
with identification but examines it critically, using the technique of montage,
which shows that no representation is fixed and final. It is political through and
70 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

through, for it shows that the spectator is never only at the receiving end of
representation, but is included in it. (19)

The active role of the audience is explicitly sought in León’s text. She, in fact,
brings the readers into her text in this anecdote, as the audience listening to the
recitation of her ‘‘triste historia.’’ As in a Brechtian play, this active participation is
based not, as is commonly misunderstood, with doing away with all empathetic
identification with the performer and performance, but with a critical engagement with
them, a critical stance made possible for the public by the acting, in which the actor
does not try to create a complete identification with the character. Clearly, León’s
representation of herself throughout her autobiography has not tried to reflect a
seamless, perfectly stable identity, being based, precisely, on what Smith called an
‘‘ongoing process of identification and disidentification.’’
This dialectic of proximity and distance could also be applied to the very topics
that León includes in her ‘‘triste historia.’’ It is now one in which the ‘‘problema de
España’’ has been de-centered, in a move that underscores the fact that it should not
be understood in isolation, but as part of a larger historical context of political
struggle and oppression throughout the twentieth century, one that includes the
realities of ‘‘el napalm y la bomba X, y la H y la V [in this] Despreciable siglo XX de
los inventos espantosos’’ (326). As León herself explains, evoking the writings of
Galdós in which he tries to present the history of Spain: ‘‘ahora no son episodios
nacionales los que hay que escribir, porque son internacionales’’ (390). Acknowl-
edging how such exile texts function as ‘‘episodios internacionales’’ forces the
readers/audience of León’s text to make historical connections that might otherwise
be all-too-easy to overlook.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there is an important element in
León’s text that may allow us to make important historical connections, to ‘‘dialogizar
el exilio’’ (479) as Francisco Caudet suggests, creating, in this case, a dialogue
between the realities of exile narrated therein and certain realities in Spain today. This
is what could be called the ‘‘philosophy of the phantasm’’ traversing the text. León
presents the experience of exile as a sort of living death, something which becomes
more and more acute as the text progresses.17 As Memoria de la melancolı́a approaches
its end, it presents what seems to be a ‘‘litany of loss,’’ an endless recounting of the
death of one exiled friend after another. Ghosts, of course, are partially characterized
by the fact that they can find no stable resting place, and thus are obliged to haunt the
living forever. For the exiled Spaniards that León dutifully remembers as they pass on,
it is this inability to find an appropriate resting place that seems to convert these
errant beings in life into errant beings in death.
León often remarks on the fact that the harshest punishment of exile is this
inability to find an appropriate resting place: ‘‘Estoy cansada de no saber donde
morirme. Ésa es la mayor tristeza del emigrado. ¿Qué tenemos nosotros que ver con
los cementerios de los paı́ses donde vivimos? Habrı́a que hacer tantas presentaciones
de los otros muertos, que no acabarı́amos nunca’’ (97). The lack of an appropriate
cemetery for the Spaniards who lost the civil war, particularly the inability to have
such a final resting place in their homeland, is a recurring, haunting, image throughout
León’s text: ‘‘¿Cuántas tumbas hemos ido dejando por el mundo en estos casi treinta
años de vida desterrada que vivimos los españoles? [. . .] ¡Cuántos, cuántos, y cada dı́a
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 71

un nombre más, España madre de todos nosotros, cada vez un nombre que añadir a
los que no podemos dejar sobre tu suelo!’’ (128). León sadly notices how a cemetery
that had been created in Madrid for members of the International Brigades that died
during the civil war has since been destroyed: ‘‘Los que buscaron el cementerio de las
Brigadas Internacionales, en Madrid, no han podido encontrarlo’’ (369). She recalls
how only a flag of the Spanish Second Republic marks the place where many Spaniards
died in Auschwitz, ‘‘En Auschwitz está izada hoy en memoria de los allı́ desaparecidos
la bandera de la República’’ (388), and how, in a tiny town in the Soviet Union, there
is a tombstone for a Spaniard fallen during the Second World War that does not even
record his name: ‘‘Al camarada español que salvó este pueblo.’’ ¿Cómo se llamaba?
No lo supimos nunca. Llegó, combatió y lo mataron. Nada más’’ (463).
This preoccupation with the lack of an appropriate cemetery to preserve the
memory and lay to rest the remains of so many exiled friends, along with León’s deep
sense of responsibility to keep their memories alive, leads her own text to become a
kind of cemetery itself, a lieu de mémoire, as Pierre Nora would call it, in which the
function of creating and channeling a collective memory is taken up by her writing
since it has not been taken up by society. Alda Blanco has commented on this function
of León’s text: ‘‘Marı́a Teresa León hace funcionar este texto como un sitio
de memoria simbólico en sustitución de lo que tendrı́a que haber sido un sitio de
memoria concreto y material: un cementerio con sus monumentos fúnebres’’
(48
49).
/

What is particularly striking is to recognize that this function of León’s text is one
that not only shows the terrible reality of the experience of exile when she was
writing, in the 1960’s, but is uncannily relevant today. The difficult process being
undertaken currently in Spain, laden with pain and fear, of exhuming the numerous
mass graves from the time of the civil war, shows that Spanish society still needs to
create the appropriate lieux de mémoire for many of the victims of the war.18 Jo Labanyi
reminds us that ‘‘ghosts, while they require remembrance in human consciousness,
have an objective existence as the embodiment of the past in the present’’ (78). While
León consciously takes up the responsibility of having her writing embody the
function of ‘‘remembrance in human consciousness’’ for the ‘‘ghosts’’ of exile she
evokes, the symbolic cemetery, the lieu de mémoire, that her text becomes, like the
mass graves today in Spain, is, indeed, an ‘‘embodiment of the past in the present.’’
Both the textual and symbolic cemetery that León’s narrative becomes, and the mass
graves of the civil war in Spain today, function, furthermore, to show that the Spanish
society of the present has not adequately dealt with the past, and that the predominant
narrative of Spanish history that has evolved in post-Franco Spain does, indeed, need
to be re-articulated. León’s text, along with other texts from the Republican exile(s)
of 1939, has much to contribute to this process of re-articulation, and can thus be
seen as a text that not only deals with issues of a time period that has passed, the time
of political exile during the Franco regime, but that deals with issues that are
remarkably current today.
Remembering Balibrea’s claim that ‘‘antes de recuperar de forma duradera el
exilio, su crı́tica deberá demostrar cómo esta literatura saca de quicio a España,
dinamitando su canon y sus presupuestos polı́tico-narrativos,’’ we can now see one
way in which León’s text takes on this challenge. Against the predominant narrative of
post-Franco history as one inevitably destined to the full recuperation of democracy
72 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

through a successful and peaceful transition, León’s text, and the mass graves still
being exhumed today in Spain, are ghostly embodiments of an uncomfortable past in
the present, reminders, most uncomfortably of all, that the transition to democracy has
been uneven and incomplete, that Spanish society still has great debts with its past,
that the appropriate lieux de mémoire still need to be created. They will not be able to
be created, however, until that predominant narrative of recent Spanish history is
questioned and undermined, and an acknowledgement is made of the ways in which
the transition was precisely based on, and built upon, the negation of a true engagement
with the past.19
Labanyi further reminds us that ‘‘Ghosts are, precisely, the ‘might-have-beens’ of
history that return as an actualizable, embodied alternative reality’’ (79). In order to
create that ‘‘alternative reality,’’ however, we as critics will have to learn to
‘‘disidentify’’ with the presuppositions of the dominant narrative of contemporary
Spanish history mentioned above. It is here, too, that León’s autobiography can serve
as a particularly relevant model today, with it’s foregrounding of strategies of
‘‘disidentification’’ on so many levels. Balibrea’s expression of the need to understand
how the literature of exile ‘‘saca de quicio a España’’ finds an echo in an image that
León herself presents in her autobiography. The sadness she feels in exile upon having
lost her homeland makes León cry out for another kind of ‘‘patria’’: ‘‘Una patria,
Señor, una patria pequeña como un patio o como una grieta en un muro muy sólido’’
(81). The term ‘‘quicio,’’ usually referring to a door frame, is, according to Joan
Corominas in his Diccionario crı́tico etimológico, derived from the older term rescrieço,
which means, precisely, ‘‘grieta.’’ León’s image of a patria as a ‘‘grieta en un muro
muy sólido,’’ is, indeed, a conception of the ‘‘patria’’ that ‘‘saca de quicio a España.’’
We could, indeed, see her narrative, like so many of the texts of the 1939 exile(s), as
texts that create, or better yet, embody, multiple fissures, ‘‘grietas,’’ in that ‘‘muro
muy sólido’’ that is the predominant narrative of post-Franco history which presents
the transition as a completely successful and peaceful recuperation of full democracy
that adequately dealt with, and put to rest, all issues related to the civil war and the
Francoist past.20
Remembering the predominance of images from the theater in León’s
autobiography, we could say that not only does her text embody an example of a
much-needed lieu de mémoire, but that it embodies, perhaps more appropriately, a
‘‘theatre of memory.’’ Raphael Samuel coined this term evoking Pierre Nora’s lieux de
mémoire, but placing added stress on the fact that the memories being recollected in
such ‘‘theatres of memory’’ are always unofficial, belonging to the underside of official
narrations of national development. León’s autobiography does, indeed, embody a
memory that is unofficial in many ways, as shown by the imbrication in her text of
gender and exile. The last image presented in her autobiography could be seen as a
metaphor of how her text functions as such a ‘‘theatre of memory.’’ This image can be
read as an attempt by León to highlight the unfinished process of reconstructing a
collective identity in Spain, a process that we, today, recognize as equally incomplete.
It is an ongoing process which must still strive to provide the appropriate reparation
to all the ghosts haunting the present, those in the pages of León’s autobiography, that
were not allowed to return to Spain, as well as those in the many mass graves in Spain
today still waiting to be disinterred. Memory, individual as well as collective, emerges
as an ongoing performance based on the interaction of many people, including,
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 73

implicitly, all of the readers/spectators of her text. This is implicitly acknowledged as

León calls on an old friend from the Guerrillas del Teatro, and fellow exile, to help
her convert her memories into a play for others to attend:

Antes de cerrar y volver la hoja me gustarı́a decir a Gori Muñoz: anda, Gori,
hazme la escenografı́a de mis recuerdos. Sı́, tú hubieras sido el único escenógrafo
posible de mi memoria recordando. Pero, aún tengo la ilusión de que mi
memoria del recuerdo no se extinga, y por eso escribo en letras grandes y
esperanzadas: CONTINUARÁ. (543
544) /

The awkward grammatical construction of the phrase ‘‘mi memoria recordando,’’

with the seemingly inappropriate use of the gerund, serves to highlight the
ongoing nature of the rememorative process that León’s text embodies. The final
announcement, with its capital letters, ‘‘CONTINUARÁ,’’ is a dramatic call to
action. It is up to the readers/public of León’s text to continue her ‘‘escenografı́a de
mis recuerdos,’’ scripting and performing the next ‘‘act’’ in this unfinished
representation, this ongoing ‘‘theater of memory.’’ The need for others to take up
her unfinished rememorative process was made all the more urgent at the end of
León’s life. Tragically, León suffered from acute Alzheimer’s late in life, a condition
that, ironically, did not allow her to enjoy fully her long-awaited return to Spain in
1977. The woman who had dedicated entire sections of her own autobiography to
making sure that others were not forgotten was, at the end of her life, dependent on
the remembrance of others to keep her own memory alive. It is up to others in Spain
today, especially those younger generations that León so desperately wanted to
connect with during her life, to actively remember her and her work. In this way, the
wish that her ‘‘escenografı́a de mis recuerdos’’ continue after her own memory should
disappear will have come true.

Notes
1 The groupings of images on the web site are divided into the following stages: ‘‘la
retirada,’’ ‘‘la diáspora,’’ ‘‘la segunda derrota,’’ ‘‘el gobierno en el exilio,’’
‘‘trasterrados,’’ ‘‘la Numancia errante,’’ and ‘‘los retornos.’’ These are the same
stages, and images, used in the popular exhibit likewise entitled ‘‘Exilio’’ that was
held in Madrid, at the Palacio de Cristal del Parque del Retiro, in the fall of 2002. It
was organized by the Fundación Pablo Iglesias, with the cooperation of the Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofı́a.
2 For one example, among others, of a recent study that explores the development
and repercussions, with respect to diverse cultural practices, of the ‘‘pact of
amnesia’’ during the transition see Joan Ramon Resina, Disremembering the
Dictatorship.
3 The problem of speaking about a homogeneous and unitary category of exile,
instead of a multiplicity of exiles, is one of a series of fallacies that, according to José
Marı́a Naharro-Calderón, in ‘‘Falacias de exilios,’’ have dominated much of the
study of this topic. Among other such fallacies are treating the experience of exile as
a disruption, a breakdown of the process of nation formation, instead of recognizing
that exile is inherent in the very emergence of a nation. The narration of a national
74 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

identity, in fact, is based precisely on the exclusions that such an identity is defined
against. Studying many narratives of exiles as predominantly oriented towards the
past, as nostalgic expressions of longing for the homeland, is another fallacy. This
perspective has often prevented scholars from understanding what such texts can
contribute to a forward-looking project in which these texts are seen as having much
to contribute to our understanding of issues of the present, such as, among others,
the tense relationship among different nationalist narratives and projects today in
Spain, or the difficult integration of the new waves of exile and inmigration of which
Spain is now on the receiving end.
4 The task of the Grup d’Estudis de l’Exili Literari (Grupo de Estudios del Exilio
Literario: GEXEL) headed by Professor Manuel Aznar Soler at the Autonomous
University of Barcelona is to be commended in this context. The international
conferences organized by the GEXEL, as well as the various publication series it
directs, are recovering a wealth of material from/about the Republican exile(s) of
1939. This is the foremost such project in Spain today.
5 For overviews of all of León’s publications, see Estébanez Gil and Torres Nebrera.
6 León had written one play before the civil war (Huelga en el puerto, 1933) and two
more in exile (La libertad en el tejado, and Sueño y verdad de Francisco de Goya, both
first published posthumously, in 1989 and 2003, respectively). She also wrote
theater adaptations of literary works, among them Galdos’s Misericordia, and various
essays on theater. For more detailed information on León’s work in theater and
theatrical writings, see especially León (Obras dramáticas and Teatro) and Aznar
Soler. In recognition of León’s legacy in theater and feminism, in 1993 the
Asociación de Directores de Escena de España created the annual Premio Marı́a
Teresa León para Autoras Dramáticas.
7 Other studies that have analyzed the relationship of gender and exile in León’s text
include those by López, Blanco, Riddell, and Ugarte. My analysis builds on these,
adding a greater emphasis on the way theater works in her text as metaphor and
narrative strategy highlighting the interrelatedness of representations of gender and
exile.
8 In ‘‘El teatro internacional,’’ one of the articles that León wrote after her travels in
1932 studying European theater, she shows a keen understanding of how power
functions through theatrical stagings and spectacles. She mentions, for example, the
Nazi spectacles of power that she and Alberti witnessed in Germany. See, especially,
the section ‘‘Teatro de masas’’ of her article in Obras drámaticas.
9 Alda Blanco reflects on the gender implications of this dialogical nature of León’s
narrative: ‘‘Establece ası́ Marı́a Teresa León una dinámica textual en la cual la
presencia constante de voces autoritarias se contrasta con el silencio de los
personajes interpelados anunciando, de esta manera, una de las vertientes del
importante tema del silencio, la de la otredad de la mujer’’ (46). For more
information on the gender dynamics of the early twentieth-century Spanish
patriarchal society that León is reacting to in this section of her autobiography,
see, among other sources: López, Blanco, Mangini (Memories and Las modernas) and
Volendorf for texts that talk about León specifically, as well as Nash (Mujer and
‘‘Un/Contested Identities’’) and Scanlon, for more general discussions.
10 It is important to note that if León ‘‘dis-identifies’’ with many of elements of the
patriarchal society in which she grew up, she also underscores that there was
another, alternative tradition, one made up of strong women, with which she
 P E R F O R M AT I V I T Y A N D D I S I D E N T I F I C AT I O N O F E X I L I C M E M O R I E S 75

chooses to identify more closely. This tradition includes, among others, her aunt,
Marı́a Goyri, the first woman to obtain a doctorate in Spain and her daughter,
Jimena, Marı́a de Maeztu and Emilia Pardo Bazán. For more on this ‘‘female
genealogy’’ that León creates, see López.
11 This deconstruction of ‘‘home’’ through a conscious highlighting of the legacies of
colonialism within the family history echoes the similar project that Juan Goytisolo
undertakes in his autobiography, Coto vedado, as well as in his novel Señas de
identidad. There are, in fact, many interesting points of contact between León and
Goytisolo. Among them are similar strategies of gender ‘‘disidentification’’ from
prevalent cultural norms expressed through the shifting use of pronouns within their
autobiographies. Another example is the continuation of the autobiographical
project through the writing of novels in which the autobiographical self of
the memoirs is basically disguised as a character (in the case of León this is clear with
the overlap of her novel Juego limpio and her autobiography, as is the case with the
intimate relation of Goytisolo’s Coto vedado and Señas de identidad).
12 I disagree here with Ridell, who seems to propose that there is such a progression:
‘‘Marı́a Teresa León narra en tercera persona cuando representa el pasado en el que
se le adjudicó una identidad femenina y esencial, y en primera persona a partir del
momento en que ella elabora una identidad propia, basada en su actividad, resultado
de sus experiencias, de sus vivencias existenciales (45).
13 This sense of ‘‘disidentification’’ with Spain and people living in Spain is the
recurring theme of a text that resonates deeply with Memoria de la melancolı́a: Max
Aub’s La gallina ciega: diario español. Here, Aub recounts his visit to Spain in 1969
after years of exile and expresses the extreme sense of ‘‘homelessness’’ he feels
precisely when he returns to his supposed ‘‘home.’’
14 The pharmakon is one of several figures by means of which Derrida explores the
logic of the supplement, an element that, while added to something to make it
complete, ultimately underscores its very incompleteness. Thus the supplement
always has a contradictory nature. Derrida’s discussion is based on Plato’s dialogue,
‘‘Phaedrus,’’ which tells of how the Egyptian God Theuth offers to his superior, the
divinity Thamus, the art of writing. Theuth presents writing as an aid for memory,
calling it: ‘‘a recipe for both memory and wisdom’’ (75). Derrida explains that the
term Plato uses for ‘‘recipe’’ is pharmakon, which means both ‘‘cure’’ and ‘‘poison.’’
Thus the contradictory logic of the pharmakon, which destabilizes the supposedly
straight-forward relation between writing and memory.
15 The performative nature of trauma is highlighted by Dori Laub and Shoshana
Felman, who see in trauma an interpretive tool to develop ‘‘a theory of a yet
uncharted, nonrepresentational but performative, relationship between art and
culture’’ (Testimony xx).
16 In Memoria de la melancolı́a, León explains how she and Alberti knew the German
playwright Bertolt Brecht, and how he was, in fact, scheduled to direct a production
of one of Alberti’s plays, Noche de Guerra en el Prado, when he died (444
52). /

17 Marı́a Zambrano points to a similar consciousness of exile as an experience that not

only disrupts life, but also death, defining exile as an ‘‘imposibilidad de vivir que,
cuando se cae en la cuenta, es imposibilidad de morir. El filo entre vida y muerte
que igualmente se rechazan. Sostenerse en ese vilo es la primera exigencia que al
exiliado se le presenta como ineludible’’ (32).
76 J O U R N A L O F S PA N I S H C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

18 For more information on the mass graves of the Spanish civil war, see the book by
Emilio Silva and Santiago Macı́as, as well as the work of the Association they co-
founded: La Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica. See, also, the
article by Elizabeth Kolbert and the book by Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis.
19 It is symptomatic in this respect, as Kolbert mantains, that, in a ceremony in 2003
honoring Franco’s victims held in the Congreso de Diputados in Spain, the Partido
Popular, under the leadership of José Marı́a Aznar, refused to participate ‘‘arguing,
in the words of a party spokesman, that the ceremony represented a ‘return to the
past’ which ‘contributed nothing positive’’’ (70). It is encouraging, however, that
recently, in September of 2004, the Spanish government, under the leadership of
Socialist President José Luis Rodrı́guez Zapatero, has declared that it will create an
inter-ministerial Commission to study the ways in which the government may
provide a ‘‘moral and judicial rehabilitation’’ to victims of the civil war and of
Francoism (Cué). Furthermore, the government, for the first time, has stated that it
will financially support and promote the process of exhuming the numerous mass
graves from the civil war. These are very important steps in Spain’s long-overdue
confrontation with its traumatic past.
20 The web site I mentioned at the beginning of this article, http://www.
Portaldelexilio.org, presented precisely this view of contemporary Spanish history.
León’s absence from the picture that mentioned only Alberti’s return to Spain in
1977 not only made her into a kind of ghost, but can now be seen precisely as an
example of a ‘‘grieta’’ that undermines the entirely positive picture the web page is
implicitly presenting of how the exiled community was adequately incorporated
into the new, fully democratic Spain that is celebrated at the end of the series of
pictures.

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