'A wound that cries out': Trauma and collective identity in Buero Vallejo's El tragaluz

In El tragaluz, Buero Vallejo succeeded in articulating the trauma of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath as experienced by all Spaniards, both victors and vanquished. Through his depiction of characters scarred by the war, Buero managed to suggest the need for Spanish people to come to terms with what had happened, and to work out new ways of relating to each other, and thereby, at least implicitly, to address fundamental questions about the meaning of collective, and specifically national, identity in Spain in the late twentieth century, a process which entailed acknowledging the reality of the grief and lingering guilt which were still present at that time. This article examines these issues through a consideration of the play in the light of some anthropological and psychological commentaries on trauma, relating the expression of trauma in El tragaluz to the notion of collective identity.