Literary representations of civil wars : a comparative study of novels dealing with the Spanish civil war and the Yugoslav conflict

Une guerre civile est un conflit violent impliquant un changement socio-politique dramatique qui devient un jalon historique, culturel et littéraire. C’est une période où les processus doubles de la déconstruction et de la reconstruction reformulent les lois, l’histoire et les identités communautaires. Le fait que ces transformations rapides impliquent une souffrance humaine massive est peut-être l’aspect le plus perturbant d’une guerre civile. Cette thèse analyse la façon dont les romans contemporains sur les guerres civiles de l’Espagne et de l’ex-Yougoslavie représentent l’expérience humaine au cours de ces périodes de transformations sociales chaotiques et violentes. A partir d’une étude comparative des œuvres, elle soutient que les romans représentent la condition humaine en se focalisant sur les expériences subjectives des gens ordinaires pendant les conflits, et en reléguant en arrière-plan les évènements politiques et militaires de la guerre civile.A civil war is a violent conflict of dramatic political and social change that becomes a historical, cultural and literary marker. It is a period when laws, history and identities are reformulated through dual processes of deconstruction and reconstruction. This makes evident the symbolic dimension of civil war violence and accentuates the unstable, precarious and malleable nature of identity constructs, ideologies and history. The fact that these rapid transformations implicate massive human suffering is perhaps what is most unsettling about civil war. A civil war is not only a pivotal moment in a nation’s history but as well on an individual level for those who live through it and have to adapt to the changing systems of values that redefine life during and after the conflict. This thesis examines how contemporary novels dealing with the Spanish Civil War and the Yugoslav conflict reflect on the human experience during these periods of chaotic and violent social transformations. The study presents a comparative analysis of the following works: Camilo José Cela’s San Camilo, 1936, Dževad Karahasan’s Sara i Serafina (Sara and Sefarina), Mercè Rodoreda’s Quanta, quanta guerra… (War, so much war), Velibor Čolić’s Chronique des oubliés (Chronicle of the forgotten), Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (The backroom), David Albahari’s Mrak (Darkness), and Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salmanina (Soldiers of Salamis). Parting from a close study of the texts, the thesis argues that the novels represent the human dimension by focusing on ordinary people’s subjective experiences during the conflict while relegating the political and military events surrounding the civil war to the background. Such representations aspire to redeem the complexities and the significance of individual lives and of a social collective, which the civil war’s physical and symbolic violence dehumanizes, silences and obliterates