Usurping the Apocryphal: Antonio Muñoz Molina's Cosmopolitan Memory of Max Aub's Rhetoric of Testimony

Abstract

This paper focuses on a recent gesture by the Spanish novelist and public intellectual Antonio Muñoz Molina to publicly recuperate Aub’s testimony of uprootedness in France, Algeria, and Mexico, a gesture that relies on the concept of cosmopolitan memory as it has been developed in Holocaust studies. I critique Muñoz Molina’s use of the Holocaust as a template for a transnational cultural history based on a supposedly shared Jewish past. Muñoz Molina generalizes on two levels: he turns Aub into an exemplary witness of a historical conjuncture – World War II – and he subsumes that conjuncture under a general rubric of totalitarianism. He thus paradoxically downplays Aub’s main tropes of testimony, the alias and the apocryphal, and displaces Aub’s testimonial poetics of alterity, plurivocality, and opacity with a rhetoric of equivalence, univocality, and self-evidence. Drawing on Edward Said’s reflections on exile, the chapter shows the relevance of Aub’s poetry – tellingly overlooked by Muñoz Molina – for understanding his exilic writings, and concludes with a discussion of his decentered position in Spanish culture today.