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Dissonant Voices: Memory And Counter-Memory In Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's Autobiografia Del General Franco, José F. Colmeiro

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Vázquez Montalbán's unauthorized autobiography of General Franco is built upon the use of dissonance as a strategy of resistance. The novel reveals the author's "professional schizophrenia" resulting from the dramatic authorial split as Franco's fictional ghostwriter and anti-Franco public persona, refracted internally in the split narrator of the text. This monumental construction of language and memories puts forth a metafictional examination of the conflicting relationship between history and fiction. Challenging traditional notions of authorship, referentiality, and self-referentiality, Autobiografia del general Franco obliges us to examine the dissonant discourses of historiography and memory and to ascertain the political function of writing …