The Pórtico de la Gloria in Manuel Rivas’ Postwar Novel O lapis do carpinteiro (The Carpenter’s Pencil): Art and Hagiography as a Metaphor That Subverts the Glory of Franco’s New Spain

Manuel Rivas mediates an icon of Galicia through the recontextualization of painting and pictorial narratives, sculptures and scriptures, as a counter-memory of the Nationalist victors’ mythmaking. Applying Derrida’s hauntologie, Colmeiro’s national ghostliness, and Nora’s places of memory, this chapter explores symbols of identities and ideologies, the sociopolitical manipulation, and subsequent ironic subversion of cultural icons in Rivas’ novel. Rivas’ novel reveals Pierre Nora’s theories and “inventories” of loci memoriae (places, historical figures, emblems) that codify a quintessential nation and create a symbolic realm, space, or place which roots or grounds identity. The reframed polyvalent symbols and spaces delegitimize Nationalist rhetoric that imbued meaning to and consecrated its institutionally sanctioned genocide.