“This story is impossible to be told”. Difficulty in depicting the past in two novels by Javier Cercas

摘要

In two novels based on the subject of war: Soldados de Salamina (“Soldiers of Salamis”) (2001) and Velocidad de la luz (“the Speed of Light”) (2005), Javier Cercas raises the problem of recuperation of a traumatic past through literary discourse. The questions which these novels discuss and which we wantto examine here concern complex relations between fiction and reality, history and memory (individual and collective), guilt and responsibility. In order to confront the historical reality from the contemporaryperspective, from postmemory, Javier Cercas proposes a narrative with a clear metafictional dimension creating interferences in distinct narrative levels.