El Espinazo del Diablo and Pa Negre: Childhood Resilience through the Gothic and the Monstrous in Spanish Civil War Cinema
El Espinazo del Diablo and Pa Negre: Childhood Resilience through the Gothic and the Monstrous in Spanish Civil War Cinema

Author(s): Java Singh
Subject(s): Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: deterritorialization; Spanish Civil War; childhood; resilience; Gothic; Monstrous; abjection; chronotope; oxymoron ;
Summary/Abstract: The opening and closing voiceovers in The Devil’s Backbone ruminate on the “singularities” of a ghost – “it is a terrible event (evento terrible) doomed to repeat itself time and again, a moment of pain, an emotion suspended in time.” In Bakhtinian terms, an event is a specific intersection of space and time, the when and where of the event generate distinct chronotopes, each with its own affect capacity.As an event, gothic childhood actualized in the context of a civil war stands at the intersection of a space marked by vulnerability and historical time marked by ideological conflict. This is one potential becoming made sensible by a particular regime of attractions operative in the “theatre” of Bakhtin’s chronotope of the Gothic castle, wherein fear is the dominant affect. The chronotope of the Gothic castle, with its denotive traces of legends, myths, weaponry, and hierarchical relationships, features prominently in the selected films; nonetheless, its antithesis, the chronotope of threshold is just as pervasive in the narratives. The chronotope of the Gothic castle calibrates the spaces controlled by adults, and the chronotope of threshold infuses the liminal spaces under the influence of the gothic and monstrous children.The films, acting as mimes, deterritorialize the event of childhood through the “factory” of the chronotope of threshold, which makes resilience possible. Boris Cyrulnik, a noted psychiatrist and a holocaust survivor, based on his extensive work with children in conflict zones, states that “the function of fear is to tame emotions while giving us advice at the same time. The horror has a reassuring effect because it supplies a code that tells us how to act in a dangerous situation.” The paper examines how the films, by presenting a contrasting placement of the antithetical chronotopes, demonstrate key elements of Cyrulnik’s study of childhood resilience.

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