During the long years of exile, writers like Max Aub, Francisco Ayala or Arturo Barea wrote stories in which they fictionalized the returns of the exiles before their own returns occurred. This is the case of the works collected in Las vueltas (1965) originally written in 1947, 1960 and 1964, and of Max Aub’s story “El remate” (1965), of “El regreso”, by Francisco Ayala (1948) and of the novel La raíz rota by Arturo Barea (1951). In this article I intend to draw the common lines of meaning between all these fictions and compare them with La gallina ciega. Diario español, written by Max Aub during his trip to Spain in 1969, the first time he visited since his departure in 1939 by Cerbère. We will check there the confirmation of some of the fears of the exiles expressed in the anticipatory works, the strangeness in the new country, the tendency to read its landscapes and its cities like palimpsests inhabited with ghosts and the impossibility to trace a membership to any community other than that of exile.
The Broken Root by Arturo Barea — a novel in which the author imagines the return to his homeland after ten years in exile — is considered a fictional continuation of the famous autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel. The analysis of The Broken Root and the knowledge of Barea’s biography allow for the observation that in the novel the so-called destiempo, that is the sense of strangeness experienced by the migrants returning home, is fictional. The protagonist — Antolin — a persona inspired by the writer himself, allows the author to “experience”, or actually to imagine his meeting with the family that remained in Spain. In this way he creates a hypothetical / imagined autobiography that helps him overcome the longing for homeland and the sense of guilt over abandoning the family. The events are fictional, yet probable, but the feelings expressed by the protagonist seem to reflect the real feelings of the author.
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