Psychoanalysing the Nation. A Comparative Reading of António Lobo Antunes’ Memória de elefante and Luis Martín-Santos’s Tiempo de silencio.

This article argues that Portuguese novelist António Lobo Antunes’ first work of fiction, Memória de elefante, can usefully be viewed in a comparative context alongside Spaniard Luis Martín-Santos’s novel Tiempo de silencio. Both novels represent a narrative response to dictatorship, and they display common strategies to engage their readers in a psychoanalytic interpretation of late twentieth-century Spain and Portugal and the existence of complicit attitudes to dictatorship therein. A reading of Lobo Antunes’ little discussed novel in the light of works by a comparable Spanish novelist, about whom there is a strong critical tradition, highlights significant new features and refutes the prevailing view of his early work as being postcolonial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]