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

Abstract

This article explores Antonio Muñoz Molina's recuperation of Max Aub's literary testimony of uprootedness for Spanish national culture. Muñoz Molina's reading is inflected by the concept of cosmopolitan memory as it has been developed in Holocaust studies. Muñoz Molina's recuperation can be critiqued for his controversial 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 two historical junctures—the Spanish Civil War and World War II—and he subsumes both junctures under the general rubric of totalitarianism. As a result, Muñoz Molina paradoxically downplays Aub's main tropes of testimony, the alias and the apocryphal, and disregards his testimonial poetics of alterity, plurivocality, and opacity in favor of a rhetoric of equivalence, univocality, and self-evidence that is derived from cosmopolitan memory. Thus, Muñoz Molina turns Aub into a precursor whose place he tries to symbolically usurp—along with other Jewish authors, Aub is made to occupy a trans-historical topos to which Muñoz Molina wants to discursively return.