The laughter of the ghost: humor and memory in The pencil of the carpenter of Manuel Rivas

This essay explores the role of laughter and humour in the processes of memory that Spain underwent in the socio-political and cultural realms starting in the mid-1990s. More specifically, I propose Manuel Rivas's El lapiz del carpintero (1998) as a textual locus that challenges the presumed contradictions between the solemnity of mourning and the sardonic presence of the ghost/spectre. Whereas the majority of critics have emphasized the moral and ethical implications of the instances of haunting that take place in Spanish fiction in general, and in Rivas's novel in particular, it is no less important to stress the subversive power of the comical implicit in the haunting of the narrator's conscience by the ghost of one of his victims. While acknowledging the grave magnitude of the endeavour undertaken by the memory novel, this paper argues that bringing back the spectres of the past stresses the ambiguous relationship that modernity has established with both laughter and memory.