The Disabled Bodymind and Legacies of War in Juan Marsé's Si te dicen que caí

Abstract: The fields of Disability Studies and Iberian Cultural Studies have intersected in recent research on Benito Pérez Galdós's Marianela (1878) and Tristana (1892) as well as in Ryan Prout's discussion of twentieth- and twenty-first-century film, however critics have not yet sufficiently connected the representation of disabled bodies in twentieth-century literature to the period's most important historical events of the Iberian Peninsula: The Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and the resulting dictatorship of General Francisco Franco (1939–75). In this article I will analyze the representation of the disabled body in Juan Marsé's novel Si te dicen que caí , discussing how disability is consistently mobilized in the novel's character Conrado Galán, a paralyzed war veteran, to depict the victimhood caused by both the Spanish Civil War and General Franco's authoritarianism. I argue that Marsé represents disability through Conrado's experience of staring, caregiving, and pain, which the author manipulates into a disturbing metonymy of the Spanish dictator through recurring descriptions of Conrado's body as both "putrefying" and "petrified." This article attends to the relative dearth of considerations of twentieth-century Iberian literature in conjunction with Disability Studies—in comparison to criticism on nineteenth-century literature and contemporary film—presenting a reading of representations of disabled bodies with explicit reference to the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship.