Trauma and alienation in Catalan inner exile: Interpreting Agustí Cabruja’s Les òlibes (1954) 

Summary

Almost 90 years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Catalan exile continues to be a rich and depthless source for researchers who vindicate the figure of those who decided to flee their homeland to find a safe place where to continue their cut-short futures. The goal of this project is to vindicate the figure of Agustí Cabruja i Auguet (1909-1983), an understudied Catalan writer and journalist who spent half of his life in Mexican exile, where he arrived after fighting on the Republican side during the war, later escaping to France, and ended imprisoned in different French concentration camps before fleeing to Mexico. During his exile he developed a large literary production, writing poems, novels, short stories, and monographs, always hand-in-hand with the yearning for his beloved Catalonia as a main theme. For this project, I chose the rural novel Les òlibes [The Owls,] written in Catalan and published in Mexico in 1954. This presentation will focus on an interpretation of this rural and modernist-type novel from two points of view: as an alienation of the main character, Maria Jurfreda, due to her traumatic past, and as a historical allegory, since the novel was written in Mexico but set in Salt, Girona, Cabruja’s hometown. In Les òlibes, Cabruja shows the duality of the exile expressed as a paradox, since he returns to his past, to his memories, without physically returning, creating an exercise of memory from an intimate perspective, with a symbolic as well as nationalist intention. My interpretation starts with the allegorical role of Maria Jurfreda and her two sisters, Mònica and Llucia, as a symbol of resistance of the Republican side under Falangist oppression during and after the Spanish Civil War. Using Paul Ricoeur’s concepts of time and memory, together with Paul Ilie’s study of inner exile, this project develops the trauma of the oldest sister, presenting her as an allegory of inner exile. The trauma of departure or loss suffered by the exile has become deep-rooted trauma. Maria leads the plot to an unavoidable tragedy since she is not able to turn back time to the traumatic event that unleashed her delirium, causing her hatred of everything and everyone around her. The exile, in any representation, cannot escape nostalgia, the hope of a hypothetical return. Sadly, this never happened to Cabruja, who died in Mexico without ever seeing again his beloved Catalonia.