‘“Pacto de olvido”, “dolor diferido”: Javier Cercas’s Affective Recuperation of the Transition in Anatomía de un instante’

Javier Cercas’s 2009 re-imagination in Anatomía de un instante of the attempted 1981 coup de état, ‘23-F’, and Spain’s democratic transition more broadly, though characteristically experimental with genre, goes further than in previous novels by purporting to forgo fiction for the authority of history. Yet Cercas’s empathetic retelling, which gives prominence to three of the transition’s key politicians as unlikely – and ambiguous – heroes who defended democracy, exploits the affective charge of a not unfamiliar narrative of consensus and national reconciliation. This article interrogates his recuperative and re-mythologizing stance in the discursive context of memoria histórica and recent critical perspectives on the transition, specifically the oft-reiterated and powerfully emotive notion of a pacto de olvido that has almost come to encapsulate the process.