La ilusión de lo referencial en la novela de la memoria

Nombres de lugar y de persona en Mala gente que camina de Benjamín Prado

Abstract

Benjamín Prado’s novel Mala gente que camina tells the story of a high school teacher who discovers by chance the existence of an unknown author, Dolores Serma, while writing a lecture on Carmen Laforet. While Laforet was able to publish the award-winning Nada as early as 1944, Serma only published the forgotten Óxido in 1962, a coded account of events ignored by official history. This study focuses on how place and people names are used to create the illusion of referentiality required by narratives dealing with traumatic historical events, while contributing to deconstruct this same discourse by using those events to create the biography of a completely fictional character, that of Dolores Serma, who manages to insert herself into that narrative of the past and the extratextual reality of the present. Moreover, this article shows how the novel not only recovers the memory of historical events and constitutes itself as a place of memory but participates in “performative memory” (Winter 2010, 249) by transforming knowledge about history and the past in the present.