The Civil War and the Transatlantic Exile in Solo queda saltar: Women's Bildungsroman by María Rosa Lojo

Abstract

Solo queda saltar raises the possibility of growing after the violence of the Spanish Civil War and of exile towards freedom. The novel consists of two parts: the autobiographical diary of Celia, and the memories of Isolina, her younger sister. Within the Bildungsroman genre, Celia represents the inner realization and the fight against the obstacles of her historical environment, while Isolina embodies the mutual creative transformation of heroin and historical reality, an ideal form of the Bildungsroman according to Bakhtin. The central motive of the novel is war and its aftermath. Celia suffers an attempted rape in the postwar Franco era in Spain. Writing allows her to overcome her post-traumatic nightmares and create a narrative identity (Ricoeur). The execution of her son in the military repression of the insurgency of the 70s in Argentina will shake her identity again and close her future. The forbidden memory and its recovery by the word in Solo queda saltar can be considered as a metonymy of repression or deformation in the official memory of the sufferings of the people because of war and their liberation thanks to literature. Isolina's writing, without disguising her critical and realistic vision of the past, opens towards the future with a dynamic and cross-cultural identity that moves within the transatlantic border and allows her to conceive an artistic project: the creation of Siniguales, or unique beings, unclassifiable and immune to stereotypes.