Conflictive Cultural Narratives in the Collective Memory of the Spanish Transition: The Case of Trampa para Pájaros by José Luis Alonso de Santos

In this study, we explore three related research questions: a) how is thecultural narrative of the collective memory in the Spanish transition configuredfrom a twofold perspective based on the theoretical notions of‘multidirectionalmemory’(Rothberg 2009, 2019) and‘agonistic memory’(Bull and Hansen 2016) inTrampa para Pájaros’s text; b) how the study of metaphoricity inTrampa paraPájaroscontributes to understanding the conflictive complexity in the regimes ofmetaphor that have articulated the dominant conceptual architecture of the Span-ish transition’s memory; c) in which waysTrampa para Pájarosfacilitates a re-thinking of mediations of the Spanish transition in the public discourse and howsuch insight can be transposed to other similar cases. Today, this play reads as atragedy in which the humanity of all characters and situations brings to the forethe extraordinary density of angles and perspectives that were canceled by thedominant cultural narratives of the‘two Spains’and the oblivion. In this regard,it is possible to argue thatTrampa para pájaroswas foregrounding the principlesof multidirectional memory and agonistic memoryavant la lettreand was genu-inely innovating in the field of not only the Spanish transition memory but alsoin the possibilities of re-engineering the democratic process in Spain and in itsrelation to the wave of the democratization that internationally took place in the 1990s.