Stammering and Healing in the Traumatic Narrative: Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis
Abstract
what she calls the era of testimony. This tension between speech and silence resurfaced in early 21st-century Spain while it attempted to recover the memory of the Spanish Civil War. Javier Cercas's Soldiers of Salamis (2001) mirrors this hesitation through both the novels syntax
and narrative form. Driven by the impulse to bear witness to an impossible past, the novel generates a storytelling that is as frustrating as it is
recuperative. As this article argues, Soldiers of Salamis achieves this healing effect by introducing an affective dimension to historical trauma
that exceeds language and cognition.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/rcha.v4i8.10193
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