A Journey through Zúñiga’s Invisible Madrid

Abstract

Madrid is the common ground which underlies the Spanish Civil War trilogy, by Juan Eduardo Zúñiga. The approach to literary space highlights his symbolic ability for realism, together with his ethic and aesthetic vision of both the world and the literary fact. Literary sources for this artistic conception of the city can be found among the Russian writers along with the Symbolism more plainly than in the works of local croniclers. The analisys of the story "Ruinas, el trayecto: Guerda Taro" stands as a model for a deeper study which would determine the complete map of Zuñiga’s Madrid. This short tale perfectly shows that the topography which runs through the stories traces “an invisible story of the city”. It is as well a brilliant example of how classical topics such as the “ut pic- tura poesis” or the poetry of the ruins can be reworked to sustain a foundation for a poetics. By playing the leading role in this cycle of stories, Madrid endows the whole set of the stories with a structural unity. The city is the guide to the symbolic dimension of time, and its historicity encloses a critic vision. The genre of the trilogy relates to the complex nature of the city as a chronotope. Bearing in mind these conclusions and the textual history of Zuñiga’s first edition of the Spanish Civil War trilogy, it is the purpose of this paper to update the question of what literary genre does this short story collection belong to, since specialized bibliography doesn’t seem to agree on a definition and ranges from “short story cycles” to “cuentarios” or even para-novelistic forms.