La Voz Temida Y El Logos Silenciado en España: La Trilogía Histórica De Benjamín Prado

The history of Spain during the XX century started with a divided political polarization between conservatives and progressives. It particularly intensified drastically during the first decades of the XX century. We see the accumulation of this tension reflected throughout the different forms of governments that predominated during the century: the monarchy of Alfonso XIII, the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, the Republic, the dictatorship of Franco, and finally the Transition with the monarchy of Juan Carlos I. Benjamín Prado is a poet, essayist and novelist who involved in the project of the Historical Memory Recovery. This doctoral thesis focuses on the analysis of the historical research studies that Prado has conducted to uncover the hidden atrocities under the Franco government and the Transition era. Many of these included: sexual violence used as a war weapon, the tragic exile, the forgotten pact in No sólo el fuego (1999); the impact of censorship in literature, the kidnapping of children from Republican families during the Franco dictatorship in Mala gente que camina (2006); the use of a secret army to stop the expansion of communism and the destabilization of the democratic process during the Transition in Operación Gladio (2011). In this trilogy of historical novels, Prado also analyzes the difficulties of investigating events from the recent past in Spain, as well as the use of metafiction in his works. The reader is a witness to the meta literary elements, in which the narrative and research process reminds us of the style we find history written. It is frequently presented as a reflection of the past and present ideologies, because it would be impossible to write history from a neutral perspective. The fictional history can be analyzed as a type of document that expresses the way that the human being understands his or her own history. Prado’s approach of metaliterature within these three novels points out how complicated it is to unearth the past when dealing with a society that is still deeply divided due to the ramifications of the Spanish Civil War.