Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives 1611487366, 9781611487367

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Espectros

Espectros Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives Edited by Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen

Published by Bucknell University Press Copublished by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Rowman & Littlefield All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61148-736-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61148-737-4 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Figures

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Abbreviations

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A Note on Translations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Theories of the Ghost in a Transhispanic Context Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen I: Ghostly Encounters: Haunted Histories 1 The Museum of Memory: Spectral Presences and Metaphoric Re-memberings Megan Corbin 2 The Bright Future of the Ghost: Memory in the Work of Javier Marías Isabel Cuñado 3 The Spectrality of Political Violence: Exhuming Guatemala’s Haunted Past in Tanya María Barrientos’s Family Resemblance and Sylvia Sellers’s When the Ground Turns in its Sleep Susana S. Martínez II: The Persistence of Violence: Trauma as Haunting 4 Apparitions and Absence: Spectrality in Contemporary Novels of the Disappeared Karen Wooley Martin

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Contents

5 The Literalization of Trauma’s Specter and the Problematization of Time in Aparecidos Charles St-Georges 6 Phantom Children: Spectral Presences and the Violent Past in Two Films of Contemporary Spain Sarah Thomas 7 Fog Instead of Land: Spectral Topographies of Disappearance in Colombia’s Recent Literature and Film Juliana Martínez III: Still Images: The Living and the Dead 8 Framing and Feeling Immigration: Haunting Visuality and Alterity in Ramito de hierbabuena N. Michelle Murray 9 Memento Mori: Photography and Narrative in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie Me verá Llorar Marta Sierra

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IV: Invisible Hands: Specters of the Market Economy 10 Cubagua’s Ghosts Juan Pablo Lupi 11 Portraits of the Walking Dead: Transgressing Genres and (In)visible Demographics in Maurice Echeverría María del Carmen Caña Jiménez 12 Haunting Capitalism: Biutiful, the Specter, and Fantasies of the Global Market Victoria L. Garrett and Edward M. Chauca

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Contributors

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Anillos de Elena Kalaidjian.

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Fig. 1.2

Relojes de Gregorio Sember.

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Fig. 1.3

Colgante realizado en la cárcel por Diana Cruces.

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Fig. 3.1

During an exhumation, Doña Clara holds a photograph of her husband whose remains are being unearthed. He was fifty years old when soldiers shot him in 1982. Nebaj, Quiché, 2000.

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Three women, survivors of the violence, watch as the remains of relatives and friends who were killed in the early 1980s are exhumed. Nebaj, Quiché, 2000.

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Relatives and supporters carry the remains of 120 people who were massacred in the 1980s through the principal streets of Nebaj, Quiché, 2001.

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Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

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Abbreviations

Cubagua

Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Cubagua, edIted by Alejandro Bruzual, critical ed. (Caracas: Fundación Celarg, 2014).

Novelas

Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Novelas y ensayos (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987).

Specters

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1993; 1994; 2006).

Diccionario

Maurice Echeverría, Diccionario esotérico (Ciudad de Guatemala: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006).

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A Note on Translations

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the contributors.

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Acknowledgments

As editors, we express our deep gratitude to all of the contributors, whose patience and willingness to revise during the many rounds of peer-review was exceptional. We value the commitment that each showed to the project, even as many contributors worked on their chapters and revisions through times of great transition and personal and familial challenges. In the inception of this volume, Charles St. George’s excellent paper at the first International Hispanic Conference of the Day of the Dead in Miami, Florida in 2011, which was an early version of his chapter, reaffirmed for us the importance of approaching the spectral with a strong scholarly foundation and cemented our commitment to getting this project underway. Early stages of some of the works in this compilation were presented at the seminar “Mapping Haunting in Hispanic Literatures,” co-chaired by the editors, at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Toronto in 2013. We appreciate the participation of authors Edward M. Chauca, Victoria L. Garrett, Juan Pablo Lupi, Juliana Martínez, N. Michelle Murray, and Marta Sierra. The discussions that took place at that seminar were enriched by valuable studies contributed by Isabel Cadenas Cañón (New York University), Antonio Córdoba (Manhattan College), Marco Di Paolantonio (York University), Sarah Paruolo (Stony Brook University), and Juan Ramos (College of the Holy Cross). Both Amanda L. Petersen and Alberto Ribas-Casasayas are proud members of University of California Mexicanistas Intercampus Research Group (UC Mexicanistas), which has provided continuous opportunities for stimulating intellectual exchanges, and, most importantly, enduring friendship among many exceptional and talented colleagues in our field. Alberto presented a portion of the theoretical introduction at the Bruce-Novoa Mexican Studies Conference at University of California–Irvine, a yearly event orgaxiii

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Acknowledgments

nized by the UC Mexicanistas. Thanks to Sara Poot-Herrera (University of California–Santa Barbara) for her dedication and generosity in leading this group, and to Jacobo Sefamí, Viviane Mahieux, and the graduate students of the Spanish program at University of California–Irvine who tirelessly work, year after year, to make the conference happen. The institutional support afforded by our respective universities was invaluable in the completion of this volume. Alberto was awarded travel support from the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Santa Clara University to travel to the ACLA in Toronto, and a publication grant from the Provost’s Office. Amanda also received support from the University of San Diego’s College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Office through grants awarded by Dean Mary Boyd for travel to the ACLA in Toronto and Dean Noelle Norton for manuscript completion. These grants enabled us to benefit from Sam Brawand’s helpful and exacting eye for preparing the final manuscript. The editors thank the Achivo Fotográfico de Memoria Abierta for granting the permission to reproduce the images found in Megan Corbin’s chapter, and Johnathan Moller for allowing us to reprint his photographs in Susana Martínez’s chapter. Additionally, Cristina Rivera Garza generously allowed us to use her words for the epigraph for the introduction to this volume. We would also like to extend a note of appreciation to friends and colleagues who advised us and cheered us on at various moments during this process. Thank you, Juan Pablo Lupi, Santiago Morales (Univeristy of California–Irvine), Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Washington University in St. Louis), Enrico Santí (University of Kentucky), and Santiago Vaquera Vásquez (University of New Mexico) for your professional expertise, advice, and friendship. The editors wish to express special gratitude to Antonio Córdoba (Manhattan College), who provided substantial content revisions, discussion, and editorial work of the editors’ introductory material at a critical moment in the production of this book. On a personal note, we both felt lucky to have a co-editor whose areas of knowledge and respective skills complemented the other’s so well. Alberto wishes to express his personal gratitude to his former partner N. Radhika Rao for her companionship and encouragement during their journey together. This book and other professional achievements would not have occurred without the support and wise advice of colleagues and friends Verónica Añover of California State University San Marcos, Mario Martín of San Diego State University, and Jill Pellettieri and Francisco Jiménez of Santa Clara University. Thanks to his mother, Rosa Casasayas, and to his good friends Antonio Córdoba, Álex Real, and Gerard Falip for their presence and support during the difficult moments. Amanda appreciates the support and patience of her sister, Maryann; dad, Fred; mom, Jan; brother, Mark Petersen; and grandmother, Shirley Fox, from whom she inherited an insatiable appetite for learning and books. Her friends

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and colleagues at the University of San Diego and beyond have been invaluable in helping shape her professional and intellectual accomplishments, in addition to providing friendship and solidarity on this sometimes rocky academic path: to Rebecca Ingram, Fernando Fabio Sánchez, Leonora Simonovis-Brown, and Patty Tovar, a heartfelt gracias. And certainly not least, Michael L. Onofrio, her life partner whose faith in her never waivers, deserves a big shout out for his daily tactical, emotional, and moral encouragement.

Introduction Theories of the Ghost in a Transhispanic Context Alberto Ribas-Casasayas and Amanda L. Petersen

Nuestros muertos quieren ser parte de nuestra conversación, no nos permiten olvidar, nos dicen que las comunidades que formamos en vida son parte también de las comunidades ausentes. —Cristina Rivera Garza, in Mónica Maristain 1 [Our dead want to be part of our conversation, they do not allow us to forget, they tell us that the communities that are no longer present are also part of the communities we create in life.]

The commonplace phrase, “the ghosts of the past,” evokes remoteness, something intangible that nevertheless is ever present, a sort of historical sublime. 2 As the Mexican novelist Cristina Rivera Garza reminds us in the epigraph above, ghosts and the talking dead constitute a historical relationship to a past that cannot be forgotten. They do not allow us to forget. The ubiquitous nature of the ghost in the present also constitutes an anachronism that seems to demand something of the future. The dead tell us that the communities that are no longer present—the historically and physically absent ones—are also part of the communities we create in life. Their presence is dialectic, yearning to be part of the conversations of the living, and imperative, a demand for uncovering what seems absent. This presence of the absent is what keeps even a tyrant like Pedro Páramo up at night at the end of Juan Rulfo’s ghost-filled narrative: “Porque tenía miedo de las noches que le llenaba de fantasmas la oscuridad. De encerrarse con sus fantasmas. De eso tenía miedo” 3 [Because he was afraid of the night whose darkness invaded him with ghosts. Of locking himself up with his ghosts. Of this he was afraid]. Indeed, we could choose many examples from 1

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Introduction

the literary canon to introduce the ghost as a persistent trope in contemporary Transhispanic narrative forms, 4 but Pedro Páramo represents multiple dimensions of spectrality as it is interrogated in the chapters that follow. The protagonist Juan Preciado is sent by his dying mother to Comala, a town inhabited by the talking dead to claim what is theirs. “[C]óbraselo caro” 5 [Make him pay dearly], she urges. Thus, the motivating impulse for the narrative is a personal demand for justice that, upon Juan Preciado’s entrance into the haunted world of Comala, unveils a greater, collective traumatic experience—in this particular case, the aftermath of Porfirian oppression, the Revolution, and the Cristero Wars—which have turned the town into an underworld-like space nearly deserted by the living and populated by ghosts and their echoes. The spectral presence manifests a demand from the victims of traumatic historical events, something unfinished and ostensibly unresolvable by material means. Pedro Páramo speaks specifically to the Mexican context, and also more generally, to the realities of societies “gripped in the vicious circle of unresolved tragedies.” 6 Through its nonchronological, fractured temporalities, this novel communicates the difficulty of narrating the effects of corruption and violence on those whose voices have been silenced, the deep scars that haunt a society for generations, and the economic precariousness created by incomplete or uneven processes of modernization or progress. THE GHOST IN THEORY: SPECTRAL CRITICISM The unfinished, unresolved, and fractured allude to the concept of undecidability that is central to theorizations of the ghost. While it is not our intention to provide an exhaustive introduction to spectral theory, a brief reflection on how the ghost has been defined in critical theory seems fundamental to begin the discussions that follow in Espectros. The ghost is neither dead nor alive, neither absent nor present, neither effective nor inoperant, neither actual nor virtual; it is both past and current, perceptible and imperceptible. It can be a translucent vision, an echo without a communicating body, something forgotten that remains in place, or a recurrence without a future. In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida describes the specter as a trace that evidences the ruptures in hegemonic discourse. 7 Derrida presents the challenge of examining the signification of that which cannot be defined, determined, or comprehended by existing and present categories of discourse. More importantly, as María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren note, 8 Derrida’s conceptual switch from ghost to “specter” drove theoretical focus away from questions of existence or non-existence and the afterlife (akin to spirituality and the occult) and brought the focus to its spectral quality—the immaterial conditions that can be felt, or the intangible that, through a “visor effect” 9

Introduction

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sees us without being seen. Ultimately, for Derrida, specters are a perceptible manifestation of conditions that are immaterial and immeasurable and, as such, we should learn to live with them. In Haunted Subjects, Colin Davis uses Derrida as a point of departure to reflect upon the paradox of this everpresent nature of ghosts in the post-Enlightenment world: although we seem to be unable to rid ourselves of them, we also seem incapable of keeping them with us for any sort of productive exchange. 10 However, sociologist Avery F. Gordon’s groundbreaking book, Ghostly Matters establishes that the ghost is a conceptual means to productively reveal how hegemonic discourse excludes the story of loss and absence in historical trauma. Gordon’s assertion is perhaps the most relevant for the discussions in this volume because of her preoccupation with the aftermath of oppressive and violent political regimes. Gordon establishes that social discourse fails to include violently silenced stories partly because humans are primed to pay attention to the visible, the present, the eventful, and not the invisible, the absent, or the non-occurring. Yet, the affective power of absence challenges the integrity of both the subject and the social body. The ghost, therefore, becomes a figure that uncovers how individuals and societies are impacted by what is not present, no longer present, or what could have been present. Gordon’s representation of haunting is particularly relevant to Transhispanic studies because it approaches relations between power, knowledge, and experience in the domain of capitalist logic or state terrorism. She calls for an interruption of demands for ethnographic authenticity imposed by those who expect a “true” (and totalizing) narrative from a traumatized or abused subject. Moreover, she asks to what extent the inquirer is part of the history she investigates: because the ghost speaks to her in a different way than it speaks to others, she must ask herself how can critical language express a reflective interest not only in the object of inquiry but also in the investigator. 11 The ghost implies a rupture with notions of the present as an immediately accessible, coherent, and self-contained timeframe when a call for justice for victims from the past becomes manifest in the present. Thus the ghost allows for the possibility of a transgenerational ethics, as it reveals an obligation to victims whose presence has been excluded from the historical record and hegemonic discourse. Spectral criticism also deals with questions of representation, as it grapples with how to represent the apparent and the nonapparent in written language or the persistence of the past in the present in audiovisual genres. In sum, the theory of the ghost conveys the notion of a present disrupted by attempts to verbalize images or words that contradict the coherent, unproblematic, and historically decontextualized character of the representation of social reality in hegemonic discourse. It is worth considering how spectral theories offer a productive approach for questioning dominant discourses and images in the contemporary Transhispanic world.

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Introduction

GHOSTS IN TRANSHISPANIC CULTURE The connection between spectral criticism and the topos of the ghost is particularly relevant in the context of Transhispanic cultural production, since it connects under a single conceptual paradigm themes that have been examined separately under the umbrella of Gothic and fantastic genres, magical realism, testimonial literature, and historiographical metafiction. The centrality of the ghost in contemporary Transhispanic literature is readily recognizable. The tropes of the ghost and the talking dead haunt the development of modern narrative discourse: from Quiroga’s short stories, to María Luisa Bombal’s La amortajada (1938), to Carpentier’s “Viaje a la semilla” (1941), to Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955). During the Boom, the ghost haunts exemplary texts of magical realism such as Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967) and Isabel Allende’s La casa de los espíritus (1982). Particularly in the case of Latin America, the ghost of the post-Boom and post-modern era appears to communicate something in connection with the region’s tortuous relationship with modernity and its disadvantaged status in global politics. In the case of post-dictatorial regimes both in Latin America and Spain, the ghost is a means to create new versions of the past that subvert official versions of history and recognize those who have been erased from it. 12 In Cruel Modernity, Jean Franco cannily observes little difference between Las Casas’s accounts of conquistadores’ atrocities in the sixteenth century and the “eerily similar . . . accounts of the massacres documented in the Guatemalan report of the Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, Memoria del silencio.” 13 While ignoring the different political and ideological contexts of these forms of violence runs the risk of oversimplification, Franco reminds us that “in massacres there are no distinctions; the aim is to banish the memory of victims from the earth.” 14 The disproportionate, asymmetrical nature of this violence not only attempts to eliminate a real or perceived threat but to silence even the recognition of its presence, to erase its traces. In this way, the recognition of that which has been disappeared constitutes a spectral moment. For example, the disappeared victim reappears in the form of photographs at protests, such as those from the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. These ghostly (re)appearances become accusatory acts that give evidence to the existence of the missing before a state that has attempted to erase them. Franco’s observation indicates the particular significance of applying spectral criticism to a Transhispanic context. Spectral criticism reveals a series of interconnected topics related to violence in the past, ranging from the colonial period to more recent times. It gestures to an ethics of memory counteracting the politics of closure and the silencing of the past. This line of inquiry addresses the physical or cultural colonization by powers that force

Introduction

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conformity and imitation of alien models for the sake of empire, proselytism, order, and progress upon the powerless. Revealed images and testimonials contest national narratives constructed and promoted by political institutions. Spectrality provides a framework to discuss the imperatives of modernization, progress, or ideology of the market and its imposition of the hegemonic discourse that erases the minority groups’ voices. Finally, it provides a metaphoric vehicle to illuminate dispossession, violence, and terror imposed on a (infra)citizen class—historically the indigenous or mestizo—but also modern avatars of the (infra)citizen like the subversive, or, indeed, the entire population when precarious conditions of generalized violence proliferate, such as in the context of the narco wars. Carmen Perilli defines the sinister as the characteristic narrative discourse of the late twentieth century. 15 In the horror genre, the sinister is understood as the perception of shock in reaction to a violation of the limits between life and death, reality and unreality, symbol and symbolized. As Rosana Díaz Zambrana establishes, sinister narratives are populated by characters who “han atravesado el límite terrible de las ausencias y las sombras . . . hablarán en elipsis de la crisis como una sombra que merodea la conciencia pero no debe o puede nombrarse como tal y de esta manera se edifica paralelamente un territorio de fracturas y caídas” 16 [have crossed the line between absences and shadows . . . they speak in ellipses of the crisis like a shadow that haunts the consciousness but should not or cannot name oneself and, in this way, a territory of fractures and falls is constructed]. As such, horror narratives produce ghostly characters that construct a form of narrative memory, a trope that allows one to speak of and at a history of violence and programed exclusions. From this standpoint, history becomes the dramatic setting of a dialogue of the present with a past that later must be discovered by the characters themselves before it can even be narrated. 17 Diamela Eltit discusses executed citizens in spectral terms when she asserts that they are a warning that forces us to listen “because they correspond to limited discourses extracted from a space traditionally without speech. A double site of silence. The silence that death brings and the social silence that surrounds the powerless citizen.” 18 The search for lost histories forms part of an intention to avoid an unexamined past without imposing that the end result take the form of the search for lost stories—understood as revealing consciousness and political liberation. 19 This confrontation with the past reveals a spectral moment that is manifest in the narrative acts of later generations who are disconnected from direct knowledge of acts of violence or disappearances but who nevertheless attempt to make contact with them through material traces of abandonment, what Marianne Hirsch has called the “affiliative look” of postmemory. 20 Similarly, the ghost appears from the margins of the discourse of modernity—from uneven processes of modernization to more current neoliberal

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Introduction

economic policies. This is particularly relevant for the Transhispanic world because the conquest of the Americas began by establishing military empires and foreign markets, which in turn established the foundations of the modern world. Enrique D. Dussel proposes that modernity is a process that creates military and economic advantages for the European world over all other groups. The disadvantaged groups become “Other” and all opposition, resignation, or lack of participation in the modern world is viewed as a substantial flaw in the Other. The modern world, therefore, absolves itself of culpability for the eradication of the Other. 21 However, another spectral moment emerges when the Other is recognized and their forced institutional erasure is revealed. Modernity in the Transhispanic world is haunted by the Other who is segregated, disenfranchised, and excluded by processes of colonization and modernization. Spectrality or haunting rises as an aesthetic opposed to conditions or moods generated by military, political, or economic violence in the context of modernity. It is an aesthetic that seeks ways to counteract erasure, silencing, and forgetting that eschews melancholic attachment to loss. It seeks to construct itself as an alternative to the linear, hierarchical, and rationalistic. It also looks to subvert potentially alienating realistic or documentary representations of the past by creating a deeper engagement with the realities suppressed by the simplified plots of market-driven cultural production. These contrarian aesthetics have been theorized from different yet interrelated frames of reference: rupture (Nelly Richard), the wound (Cristina Moreiras), and haunting (Jo Labanyi). We consider these discussions essential for beginning a critical discussion of the specter in Transhispanic cultural production. SPECTRAL FORMS: RUPTURE, THE WOUND, AND HAUNTING In Residuos y metáforas, a study of the state of post-dictatorship culture in Chile, Richard argues for an aesthetic of rupture. She calls for looking under and in the interstices of the dominant narratives for that which has been pushed aside, “the loose and disparate fragments of ongoing experiences: fragments that lack a formal translation in the communicative language that dominates current sociology.” 22 This criticism of the “current,” its logic, and its rhetorical strategies does not require merely contrarian, reverse representations of hegemonic discourse. Rather, Richard advocates for an oblique exploration: to construct “certain representational maladjustments . . . verbal disaffiliations . . . idiomatic ruptures”; a dissonant discourse that may introduce “signs of alteration and nonconformity into the routines of speech.” 23 In other words, she advocates for a rupurist aesthetic—decentralizing, centrifugal—that attacks notions of hierarchical order and narrative organization so

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that “[t]he aesthetic (defined as the will to form), the cultural (symbolic figurations), and the political (codifications of power and struggles over meaning) overlap and interact in the same space.” 24 Perilli describes this aesthetic in terms of searching for a history starting from “la discontinuidad de lo colectivo y la inscripción de lo individual fracturado” 25 [the discontinuity of the collective and the inscription of the fractured individual]. It is important to note that the residual or rupturista aesthetic described by Richard has nothing to do with the institutional demand for erasure and making a clean slate—through amnesty laws, forced obedience, or judicial immunity. In contrast, it refuses to treat cultural discourse as something that Stuart Hall called a “second-order mirror” in which the already existing is reflected, 26 which originates the unproblematized belief in the ability to retrieve historical past “as it really was.” For Richard, “residual” or “unsutured” discourse depends on forms of representation of late modernity and postmodernity with political or nonconformist motivations that question the balance between discourse and reality and challenges assumptions about our perceived capacity to communicate the surrounding reality. This questioning attempts to cast doubt upon the military and post-dictatorial regimes that publicly present the obviousness of truths such as social stratification based on individual abilities, metaforizations of the nation as family, and the free market and consumerist society as natural manifestations of societal economy. In connection with Richard’s notions of suture and rupture, Moreiras draws a theory of interstitial residues in narrative that emerge from unhealed cultural wounds. Cultura herida [Wounded Culture], her study on Peninsular Spanish literature and film of the post-Franco period, traces both the violence of erasure from historical memory as well as “la violencia originada por la presencia de los residuos impresos en esa borradura, y que interviene inevitablemente también en las generaciones que no han vivido ese pasado” 27 [the violence that is originated by the presence of the residues imprinted on this erasure, and that inevitably intervenes as well in the generations who have not lived this past]. Such residues escape the institutional culture attempting to impose postdictatorial narratives that articulate new subjectivities that witness present reality without affective or ideological links to the past. Thus, the cultural landscape is constituted by the tension between the institutional requirement to narrate a present (while excluding its history and that represents itself as origin or foundational space) and those residual elements, hidden, nonsymbolized “residuos . . . impensables desde las políticas culturales, van dejando así estelas incorpóreas (no inscritas en la narrativa, pero contenidas en sus intersticios) que surgen a modo de fisuras sin suturar cuyas cicatrices se imprimen con fuerza desestabilizadora” 28 [residues, inconceivable in political circles, that leave behind corporeal wakes (not inscribed in

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the narrative, but contained in its interstices) that arise from the unsutured fissures whose scars are imprinted with a destabilizing force]. Labanyi argues convincingly for an aesthetic of haunting, observing that “it is only by capturing the resistances to narrativization that representations of the past can convey something of the emotional charge which that past continues to hold today for those for whom it remains unfinished business.” 29 She criticizes Richard’s “rupturist” aesthetic because it “argues for cultural forms that keep open the wounds left by the dictatorship, restaging the trauma rather than resolving the narrative fractures through the production of a coherent narrative” 30 and the refusal to close the wounds prevents a productive dialogue with the past. For this reason, Labanyi argues for an “aesthetics of haunting, which listens to the voices from the past that have not previously been allowed a hearing, seems more appropriate in the Spanish case than an aesthetics of rupture, which is predicated on the classic notion of trauma as the blocking of recall.” 31 She does not describe a voice that imposes itself over the victim’s or that speaks for him or her, what Susan Sontag calls “the bad faith of empathy.” 32 The vision of the past that Labanyi establishes manifests its dark points—its relative inaccessibility, its distortions—without positing it as an ineffable or nearly sacred experience whose only possible contact is emotional, as has occurred in some variations of trauma and Holocaust studies. Labanyi uses cinematographic examples such as El espíritu de la colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive] or El espinazo del Diablo [The Devil’s Backbone] 33 that reject the realist aesthetic and embrace metaphor, suspense tactics, and characteristic themes of the horror film genre. Realistic and empathetic representations of the past presume its accessibility, and, by “plunging us into the past,” 34 these representations force the viewer to experience the past as detached from the present. Haunting aesthetics, however, operate with an indirect, deliberately unrealistic approach that acknowledges the difficulty of narrativizing the past. Moreover, its emphasis on the aftereffects of violence establishes affective links between past and present as well as the availability of this past to be repaired by a discursive act of justice. The aesthetic of the wound, rupture, or haunting all place into question the notion of an accessible past as well as its related realistic aesthetics. In doing so, these scholars also criticize the principles that late capitalism uses to justify imposing its hegemony. Labanyi suggests that we view modernity in terms of perceptions of the past in the present—beyond capitalist modernization. 35 In this context, the aesthetic of the ghostly becomes particularly relevant because it questions a state of commercialization that, in Idelber Avelar’s words: [N]iega la memoria porque la operación propía de toda nueva mercancía es reemplazar la mercancía anterior, enviarla al basurero de la historia. . . . El capitalismo transnacional impuesto en Latinoamérica sobre los cadáveres de

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tantos, ha llevado esta lógica a un extremo en el que la relación entre pasado y presente está totalmente circunscrita en esta operación sustitutiva y metafórica. El pasado debe ser olvidado porque el mercado exige que lo nuevo reemplace a lo viejo sin dejar residuos. 36 [Denies remembering because the purpose of all new merchandise is to replace the product that came before it, to throw it into the trash bin of history. . . . The transnational capitalism imposed in Latin America over the corpses of so many, has taken this logic to such and extreme that the relationship between the past and the present is completely circumscribed in this metaphorical and substitutive operation. The past should be forgotten because the market demands that the new replaces the old without leaving behind remnants.]

Avelar’s discussion underscores how the presentist, disposable culture of capitalist neoliberalism serves as a cover of past violence and hinders addressing its legacy. Rupturist or haunting aesthetics represent a strategy to contest the denial of the past and inability to productively incorporate it. Significantly, in eschewing testimonial dimensions of discourse, the aesthetic of haunting does not deny the traumatic effect of military violence, the deconstruction of the state, or the impositions of global capitalism but rather focuses on untellable violence as a paradigm of the contemporary condition in an attempt to establish a more productive affective relationship with the lost or the unreachable. ESPECTROS This volume brings to light the aesthetic of haunting in the Transhispanic context, thereby unifying preexisting theoretical directions and providing innovative critical readings that reveal the spectral’s ability to create a dialogue with the lost past in the present. The contributors to Espectros examine the specter in different dimensions: haunted aesthetics as means of manifesting lingering effects of troubled histories and political legacies; haunting as form of representing the aftermath of individual and collective traumas; the ghost’s relationship with still and moving images, especially in connection with those no longer present; and, finally, the spectral as a symbolic representation of economic pressures of capitalism. We consider this volume to be an introduction to the specter in narrative discourse as it manifests how a spectral aesthetic proves insightful in the Transhispanic context. The tropes of the ghost and the talking dead, and the broader ranging theme of spectrality, offer a fundamental, comprehensive framework from which to understand the social, political, and economic dimensions of cultural expression in the Transhispanic world. The editors recognize that the depth of ethnic and cultural phenomena that can be approached through the framework of spectral criticism is vast and it is our hope that this volume will become an

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Introduction

invitation for further analysis of the pervasive influence of the ghost and talking dead beyond the scope of this volume. NOTES 1. Cristina Rivera Garza, interview by Mónica Maristain, “‘Nadie que quiera escribir hoy, puede olvidar a nuestros muertos,’ dice Cristina Rivera Garza,” Sinembargo.mx, July 7, 2013. 2. Early versions of sections of this introduction were presented at the opening of the seminar “Mapping Hauntings in Hispanic Literatures” at the American Comparative Literature Conference in Toronto in 2013, and at the XIX Bruce-Novoa Mexican Studies Conference in Irvine, California. 3. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo (Madrid: Cátedra, 2002), 178. 4. We chose to use the term “Transhispanic” to describe the wide origins and contexts of this volume—to unbind the tenuous boundaries of a geocultural space that literary studies calls “Hispanic,” and which implies a political, cultural, or linguistic hegemony. We recognize the internal diversity and tensions that may exist within political entities that have minimized the expression of ethnic and cultural groups within them. We also acknowledge that internal conflicts have generated their own diasporic cultures, which may or may not express themselves in Spanish. Therefore, while we recognize the existence of a demarcation commonly known as “Latin America and Spain,” our understanding of “Transhispanic” does not assume the existence of an internal continuity or cultural cohesion, much less an organic identity, national, linguistic, or otherwise. “Transhispanic,” under a spectral perspective, recognizes the existence of points of encounter and spaces of difference beyond the disciplinary necessities of confining and labeling a space through language, nation, or region, as is the case with the legacies of violence, be it political, economic, or cultural. Furthermore, by using this term, we seek to invite further discussion of spectrality within marginalized or minoritized groups in Latin America and Spain and their diasporas, beyond the modest reaches of this volume. As editors, we actively sought contributions that spoke to the spectral in indigenous and Afrohispanic contexts, as well as the treatment of texts written in languages other than Spanish or English, but were unsuccessful. It is our hope that this volume opens up the field of spectral criticism so that these traditions will also be treated. An example of this important work on the indigenous in the North American context is Phantom Past, Indigenous Tradition: Native Ghosts in North American Culture and History, ed. Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011). 5. Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, 65. This quote is also a type of literary ghost, as Élmer Mendoza’s 2005 novel in homage to Rulfo is titled Cóbraselo caro (Madrid: Tusquets). Pedro Páramo has a haunting presence in many contemporary literary productions, such as Susana Pagano’s Y si yo fuera Susana San Juan (México, DF: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1998). 6. Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America, ed. Will Fowler and Peter Lambert (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 1. In this quote, the authors establish a parallel between the novel and Latin America as a whole. 7. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994: 2006) (hereafter cited Specters and printing year). 8. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “Introduction,” in The Spectralities Reader, ed. Blanco and Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 9. 9. Specters (2006), 6. 10. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 7–8. While Davis’s work distinguishes between the proliferation of ghosts (and zombies, vampires, etc.) in “pop” or “mass” cultural productions that reproduce old topoi and hauntings grounded in psychoanalysis and existentialism, this distinction seems irrelevant in the Transhispanic context, where literature, visual arts, and film appear to share similar concerns.

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11. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 12. José Colmeiro, “Nation of Ghosts?” 452°F: Electronic journal of theory of literature and comparative literature 4 (January 2011): 31, at http://www.452f.com/en/josecolmeiro.html (accessed May 17, 2013). 13. Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 6. 14. Franco, Cruel Modernity, 20. 15. Carmen Perilli, Las ratas en la Torre de Babel (Buenos Aires: Letra Buena, 1994), 47. 16. Rosana Díaz Zambrana, “Circuitos del fracaso: Lugares de negación y espectros en Una sombra ya pronto serás de Osvaldo Soriano,” Cincinnati Romance Review 22 (2003): 83. 17. Lois Parkinson Zamora, The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 36. 18. Diamela Eltit, “Prólogo. Me fusilaron en Chena,” in Sobrevivir a un fusilamiento, ed. Chérie Zalaquet (Santiago, Chile: El Mercurio, 2005), 15, quoted in Franco, Cruel, 168. 19. Eltit, “Prólogo,” 21, quoted in Franco, Cruel, 168. 20. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 9. 21. Enrique D. Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (New York: Continuum, 1995), 137. 22. Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition, trans. Alan West-Durán and Theodore Quester (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 4; Richard, Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 1998). 23. Richard, Cultural Residues, 5; Emphasis in original. 24. Jean Franco reflects on Richard in The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 266. 25. Perilli, Las ratas, 44. 26. Stuart Hall, Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 236–37. 27. Cristina Moreiras, Cultura herida. Literatura y cine en la España democrática (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2002), 17. 28. Moreiras, Cultura herida, 29. 29. Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficult of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today. 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 107. 30. Labanyi, “Memory,” 108. 31. Labanyi, “Memory,” 109. 32. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004) 7, paraphrased in Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,” 111. 33. Francisco J. Querejeta, Victor Erice, and Ángel Fernández Santos, El espíritu de la colmena, directed by Erice (Madrid: Bocaccio Distribution SA, 1973); and Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, and David Muñoz, El espinazo del Diablo, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Spain; Mexico: Warner Sogefilms AIE; US: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001; Columbia TriStar Entertainment, 2004). 34. Labanyi, “Memory,” 113. 35. Labanyi, “Memory,” 91. 36. Idelber Avelar, Alegorías de la derrota: La ficción postdictorial y el trabajo del duelo (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000), 285.

I

Ghostly Encounters: Haunted Histories

Spectral theory is concerned with the notion of a present that is out of joint, divided from itself by a rift that makes room for the conflictive overlap of the present, the future, and the past, and alternative presents, pasts, and futures. In short, specters produce disjointed times. History has generally been understood either as a series of moments in coherent chronological succession, or as a causal process that brings to one necessary point; this approach makes history nothing but a collection of the stories of the victors, or about the progressive constitution of a nation or civilization. A certain traditional Hegelian vision, with its teleological interest in the present as the culmination of history, privileges contemporary hegemonic views, and invites an adoption of conservatism that leads to the preservation of current gains at the expense of those excluded from them. A classical Marxist vision of history describes an opening of the present only as a step ahead toward a utopian future in which the contradictions of capitalism are superseded, and history, at last, reaches its very end in the perfect harmony between socialist humanity and historical destiny. All these secularized scatological visions either privilege traditionalism or tend to represent the past as a breach that has been closed. When individuality is emphasized, the result is a liberal capitalist tale of personal autonomy and self-reliance; when collective action is promoted, differences, particular concerns, and heterogeneous articulations are usually effaced from institutional representations. The critique of historiography from Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida and Avery Gordon has tried to upset these preconceptions, configuring a spectral approach to history as a space for ethical

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Part I

exchanges that transcend the subjects’ empirical presence in any given time. They invoke the appearance in, or interruption of, the present by undecidable, noncontemporaneous entities that fill the emptiness of modern time with inexhaustible meaning that makes moments break free of any teleological scheme. Ghosts press on the haunted the transformative recognition that something is to be done, that something needs to be done. For spectral history, time is always full with potential and responsibility; the unresolved or unregistered conditions of the past go on influencing the present; and the future is open and at the same time the depository of certain ethical obligations of those who are living to those that will come. The haunting of these entities on the margins of the present forces us to see ourselves as divided from our current moment, ourselves as the ghosts of our past and future. We are always living in someone else’s future and someone else’s past, and we may not even be contemporaneous with ourselves. These notions compel us to reexamine our phenomenological parameters and contemplate the past as much more than just a moment whose potential was spent in one self-consuming shot. Instead of a depleted instant that is nothing but a milestone, the past is a constellation of possibilities, actual events and counterfactuals that operate as a persistent force that intervenes into and modifies the present, more often than not in a way that is not apparent or that is obscured or minimized by the ruling discursive paradigms. Spectral history encourages us to understand social and political struggles of the present as a disjointed reactivation, a return with a difference, an untimely actualization of the struggle and oppression in the past—a well-established tradition in Latin America, from Túpac Amaru II to the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) [Zapatista Army of National Liberation]. Thus the ghostly character of narrative in connection to history comes to the fore. Finally, spectral history explores the historical weight of affect, as it makes us contemplate the impact of historical processes in the emotional experience of individuals in a way that transcends the mere glorifying/vilification of rulers of the past, or the biased concentration on the experience of individuals that was registered in the archival record. We have selected three contributions in this volume to illustrate the historical dimension of haunting and the spectral in ways that point toward the connection of this trope with the affective dimension of material remnants, visual evidence, and the efforts of individuals and collectivities to address unresolved justice issues. Megan Corbin’s “The Museum of Memory: Spectral Presences and Metaphoric Re-memberings,” challenges us to confront the hermeneutic process generated by haunting beyond textuality. With her examination of the material fragments left behind by prisoners in the torture facilities of the Argentinean Junta, as well as the scarce remains of extrajudicial executions of the Pinochet regime left in Atacama desert, Corbin explores the tensions between desire for a unified, coherent narrative and the

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reality of interrupted and fragmented echoes of a traumatic past, as well as the ensuing production of affective signification. Isabel Cuñado studies the connections between death and memory in the post-Francoist era through an analysis of four decades of ghost tales produced by Javier Marías. According to Cuñado’s chapter, “The Bright Future of the Ghost: Memory in the Work of Javier Marías,” Marías’s work articulates the difficulty of enunciating the traumatic effect of a violent past, thereby creating a disjointed, paradoxical discourse about the (im)possibility of speech. In this context of structurally flawed communication, living with ghosts becomes an act of posthumous justice, and an acceptance of haunting is offered as a valuable memory practice. Writing in the aftermath of the unprecedented sentencing of dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, Susana S. Martínez’s “The Spectrality of Political Violence: Exhuming Visual and Textual Representations of Guatemala’s Haunted Past in Tanya María Barrientos’s Family Resemblance and Sylvia Sellers’s When the Ground Turns in its Sleep,” engages in a comprehensive study of Guatemalan American photography and fiction to advance that, in a context of criminal impunity, haunting provides the optimal theoretical framework to bear witness to the overwhelming silence and absence that follow politically violent processes. She further argues that haunting of a past that was never lived now marks the identity of second-generation Guatemalan-Americans.

Chapter One

The Museum of Memory Spectral Presences and Metaphoric Re-memberings Megan Corbin

INTRODUCTION: THE ABSENT WITNESS—THE ENDURING MATERIAL Claudia Bernardi is a member of the renowned Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense (Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team). In “An Angel Passes By,” she describes her work at the site of the massacre of El Mozote in El Salvador, where she and her team worked to uncover the buried remains of women and children: “Skeleton #33: We find signs that it was a woman. A hair pin. A bra.” 1 In her reflections on the experience, she states, “It is harder to find these objects associated with the skeletons than it is to uncover the remains.” 2 Bernardi explains “skeletons in a mass grave give me a profound tenderness . . . I am touching history with my hands.” 3 Her reactions point to the same power identified by Marjorie Agosín in her claim that “memory speaks from dead bodies.” 4 The declaration that the dead can speak appears counter-intuitive, but begs the important question of whether a body itself can have a post-mortem agency. If so, what type of capacity to speak is this? And, if objects are emotionally harder to find than the skeletal remains themselves, do things also hold this power? The material object poses a unique possibility to the scholarship of memory, in much the same way that Francine Masiello observes “art and literature . . . force us to think of interpretive strategies of resistance, interrogating the past and leading to a politics of cognition with which to move toward the future,” 5 the importance given to objects from the past in spaces of memory points us to a reconsideration of the interpretative power of such materials. The attempt to narrate the realities of genocide is an act that has received 17

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Megan Corbin

much critical attention, especially in relation to the Jewish Holocaust and the period of violence in Southern Cone Latin America (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay) during the second half of the twentieth century. In terms of the former, Dori Laub argues that “what precisely made a Holocaust out of the event is the unique way in which, during its historical occurrence, the event produced no witnesses.” 6 In terms of Latin America, the same paradox motivates Idelber Avelar to argue that allegory constitutes the most adequate (and perhaps only) means for approximating a representation of the terrors of mass violence. 7 Both of these analyses focus largely on the means by which to facilitate the subject’s testimonial capacity to speak. In the absence of a surviving complete witness, 8 in the silencing of the subject due to disappearance or death, can the material act as an “invaluable record—a testimonial object, a point of memory”? 9 The role of the material has not been entirely ignored in critical considerations of the Latin American post-dictatorship period, nor has it been in the field of memory studies. However, though many have discussed the power of the memory space in transitional justice and in the healing of a traumatized society, 10 only now are scholars beginning to contemplate the plain things, 11 the tough-to-find objects, and the belongings of the past whose residues haunt the present. This chapter reconsiders the everyday object, once present at the scene of torture or detention and presently occupying the role of witness in the space of the museum and reevaluates this material in light of testimonial and spectral theory. In so doing, it becomes clear that material objects speak a truth about the past, giving what I introduce as the concept of “spectral testimony” in lieu of the voices of the objects’ disappeared owners—a type of testimony that is a form of deferred agency that lies in the realm of the just beyond. It is a concept I connect to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the third state of the muselmann, but also to Jacques Derrida’s ruminations on the specter of Karl Marx that continues to haunt society, along with his thoughts on the fiction of testimony, a type of writing that yields a phantom real that is ever-present, yet ever just beyond reach. I suggest that spectral testimony interpellates the viewer in the present with a deferred past and requires him or her to do the work of memory, to contemplate what the object offers, at the same time that the spectral nature of this process calls attention to the limitations on knowing posed by the violence of the past. THE OBJECT’S PAST: TURNING TO THE MATERIAL FOR SURVIVAL The importance for considering objects in the post-dictatorship is underlined by the scripting of their role during detention by survivors in testimonials.

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Objects in testimonial texts hold utilitarian value for both the testimonial subject and his or her victimizer. During the period of violence, everyday items—often belonging to the prisoners themselves—were converted into objects of torture. The Argentine Nunca Más [Never Again] report from the Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) [National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons] recounts cases in which “the captors either brought their own blindfolds, or used the victim’s own clothes—shirts, pullovers, jackets, etc., or sheets, towels and so on.” 12 Yet, personal objects, or property, were also a means by which the testimonial subject retained or rebuilt his or her subjectivity while in detention. This important role of objects for both the breakdown and subsequent recuperation of subjectivity signals a fundamental change in the everyday object preversus post-victimization. Elaine Scarry’s now canonical study The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World established that this new ordering of the material world occurs for the victim during the scene of torture. According to Scarry, before this scene, objects already play a crucial role in the formation of the subject. In the case of the tortured person, such objects are not only changed, but actually participate in the prisoner’s resistance, in the reconstitution of a reduced subjectivity, producing Scarry’s reordering of the subject’s relationship to the material world, but also giving the object a memorial charge that retains the residual presence of the disappeared subject. 13 This dangerous potentiality posed by the object is palpable in the way in which such everyday items were policed and pillaged during the dictatorship. In survivor Alicia Partnoy’s The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, objects are a conduit by which to extend kindness and caring to a fellow detainee. They also help retain a semblance of subjectivity in a space systematically designed to deny the prisoner such autonomy. For example, food not only nourishes the body, but the soul: “I have some cheese and a small end of bread saved for tomorrow. . . . If I cut them into little pieces, then put them between my toes, I can pass the bread and cheese to Benja. The blanket is covering my feet; the guard won’t see me. It’s too bad I didn’t save the quince jam!” 14 The food passed to Benja during his first night of detention at the Little School is a conduit not only for sustaining his bodily strength so that he may withstand the brutal violence that is being inflicted on him during his initial torture sessions, but also a way for Partnoy to nurture Benja’s spirit, as Partnoy remarks: “Bread is also a means of communicating, a way of telling the person next to me: ‘I’m here. I care for you. I want to share the only possession I have’” 15 and “to give a brother some bread is a reminder that true values are still alive. To be given some bread is to receive a comforting hug.” 16 In the preface to Partnoy’s text, Julia Alvarez astutely writes: “We watch as she rolls her ration of bread into twenty-five little balls rather than eating

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it, desperate to create something, anything, in an environment where everything is being destroyed.” 17 In the tale to which Alvarez refers—appropriately titled “Bread”—one of the guards discovers that Partnoy has been creating the balls of bread and asks her what they are for. She responds: “To play with.” 18 He “kept silent for two minutes while he meticulously calculated the danger level of that toy,” 19 then determines that “it’s okay.” 20 Yet Partnoy disagrees, stating the guard was “wrong.” 21 Her ruminations on the way in which the little balls of bread could be used to transmit caring—thus, subverting the dominant paradigm of absolute silence and isolation among the prisoners—ultimately point to the small piece of bread as a conduit for resistance, an act of defiance that cannot be undertaken without a self-sense of some type of subjectivity: the prisoner who resists through an act of creation has necessarily not been successfully removed of his or her personhood. In The Little School it is not only food (a non-enduring substance) that acts in this manner, but material objects as well. In “The Small Box of Matches,” Partnoy describes how she lost a tooth in the detention center, a piece of herself that she now keeps safeguarded in an empty Ranchera matchbox. Partnoy explains: This small box of matches is my only belonging. Sometimes I own a piece of bread, and once I even had an apple. But this box is my only non-edible belonging. Now I keep my box under the pillow. Every so often I touch it to make sure it is still there, just because inside that little box is a piece of myself: my tooth. 22

The matchbox allows Partnoy to keep a secret: the possession of her tooth. Defiantly, the matchbox permits her to keep a part of herself (of her body) for her alone, outside of the watchful and violating gaze of the prison guards. The power of the object for Partnoy is underlined for the reader in the explanation of the danger it poses in the detention center: “The little matchbox will bring me trouble. Sooner or later a guard is going to decide that the box is a dangerous object in my hands. Right now it’s my only possession.” 23 Material possessions are often the markers by which we identify the personalities of individuals, a means to cultivate a personal style or way of presenting oneself to the world. But they are also a part of what differentiates social life (bios) from animal life (zoē)—to use Agamben’s distinction. 24 In this sense, the object is a tether to subjectivity, to the resistance of the total destruction sought out in the dictatorial quest for determinative control in the social (and, of course, political) sphere. Partnoy’s little matchbox is a small item, but it performs a monumental task: it guards a piece of Partnoy that the dictatorship has violently removed from her—her tooth—and assures that her personhood remain intact, that the small piece of calcium that has become detached from her body remains with her, remains a part of her, remains in

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her possession. The commingling of the matchbox and Partnoy’s tooth, a remainder of her body, highlights the commingling of the material and spiritual world, of the object and the subject, the lifeless and the living. The change of the detainee’s relationship to the material world pre- versus post-detention is also observed in Alicia Kozameh’s Pasos bajo el agua. 25 Detained and incarcerated during the dictatorship, Kozameh expresses that she does not write testimonio, but rather novels and poetry, insisting on a differentiation between her voice as a survivor and the authorial voice that appears in her text. Yet, an image of a cup and spoon, which appears in the first edition of Pasos bajo el agua, but in none of the subsequent versions, is directly reproduced from the notebook that Kozameh was allowed to have in prison. The edition begins with the image of the official document that gave Kozameh the permission to keep the notebook in prison. My assertion is that Pasos bajo el agua is a testimonial text, but that the removal of the images of the document and the cup and spoon (presumably used by Kozameh to eat in prison) after initial publication was meant to diminish the testimonial quality of the text, after it forced Kozameh into exile a second time when she was threatened in Argentina after its publication. The drawing, the objects, augmented the text’s testimonial charge, thus pointing to the importance of a reconsideration of their power. The representation of objects in subsequent versions of Pasos bajo el agua moves out of the temporality of the dictatorship and into the immediate years that followed. The detained person’s voice remains represented, but is no longer speaking from the space of the prison. In a chapter added when the text was translated and republished into English, “Sara, What Does a Jacket Mean to You?” the importance of the object for the detainee after liberation is markedly evident. In the space of exile (Mexico), Sara (the text’s testimonial subject) remarks to her friend Chanita: “You don’t know what a jacket is,” 26 marking a fundamental difference between the two. She reveals: “This jacket has an importance for me that would be very difficult for you to imagine,” 27 placing herself at a distance from the comprehensible realm of possibility that exists for Chanita. Sara’s conception of jackets is fundamentally human: “The jackets tremble. They shake. They walk. They face death.” 28 This humanness is further emphasized in the remark: “That’s why thinking of that denim jacket makes me sleepy. Because it humiliated itself trying to be something it wasn’t. And people like that bore me. I know we’re not talking about a human being. Though to tell you the truth, certain human beings are not easily distinguishable from jackets. And certain jackets seem to have attitudes. The attitudes of certain human beings” 29 and “there are jackets that are part of some people.” 30 This chapter tells the story of the jacket that belonged to Hugo, Sara’s husband, prior to his detention. The blending of Hugo’s subjectivity into his (and specifically his) jacket, this “very symbiotic relationship” 31 for Sara

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marks the robbery of this item and its use by a milico [soldier] as an even greater violation: “Just like that, out of nowhere, and with Hugo’s jacket. Not carrying it around, but wearing it. Wearing it. . . . Taking it over. Filling, invading that space which didn’t belong to him. Almost like peeling off Hugo’s skin and covering himself with it.” 32 The melding of flesh and leather signals a reordering of the material world that exists for Sara post-detention; her reconstruction of the events of Hugo’s kidnapping and mistreatment by the military regime occurs allegorically through the mistreatment of the jacket—the flesh being pulled off of one man, to cover another. The revealing of Hugo’s story via the disappearance and subsequent reappearance of a jacket signals a testimonial capacity held by objects due to their connection to personhood, especially that of detained or disappeared subjects, a power which remains in the period after violence, in the fight for the reconstruction of memory. Hugo’s subjectivity, his personhood, remains attached to the jacket as it goes on to circulate through society, through the space of the city of Rosario, Argentina, disappearing and reappearing from Sara’s life in unpredictable ways. The result of the changed relationship of the material to the human, of this reordering/remaking of the material world, is the production of a new meaning of the object not only for the disappeared person, but also for the rest of society. In the texts explored above, the voice of the detainee is accessible; Partnoy and Kozameh survived to tell their stories. However, for thousands of detainees this is not the case. Their voices cannot be heard, but yet material traces of their past presences remain in the wake of their disappearance. The doubt that remains attached to material objects, their integral function in not only the dictatorship’s project of control, but in the resistance by the detained, marks the history of the object, imbuing it with not only its own past, but a phantasmal presence that remains residually attached to its materiality even after the disappearance of the person for whom it represents hope, resistance, rebuilt subjectivity, and even life. AFTER DETENTION OR DISAPPEARANCE: HAUNTED OBJECTS IN THE MUSEUM OF MEMORY The virtual art exposition Vestigios 33 is an ongoing memory project by Memoria Abierta, a nongovernment organization (NGO) devoted to the diligent archiving of the recent past in Argentina. The project, premised upon the memory power of the material past, invites survivors and families in the postdictatorship to submit photographs and written histories showing and explaining important objects connected to the cases of the detained and disappeared. As a project, in its spotlight presentation of the former belongings of the disappeared, Vestigios highlights the failure of the dictatorship’s efforts

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to reduce the subject to an object, of the desire to disappear subversive presences. Vestigios, as a virtual space of memory, is a work in progress. It invites participation through submission of objects with stories, thus providing a space for the labors of memory to take place. The puzzle-like placement of the images of the objects (which shifts upon each site visit) points to the idea of recuperative work in progress, inviting active participation into the struggle for completion. The impact of the submitted narratives comes from the accompanying images of the objects themselves. We are not only told about a ring that was worn by a disappeared sister and was discovered along with her bodily remains, we are shown the recovered ring in its full material form (figure 1.1). The object itself holds a prior knowledge, the marks of having-once-been. In the space of the museum it has the capacity to effect change, these objects “force us to think of interpretive strategies of resistance, interrogating the past and leading to a politics of cognition with which to move toward the future.” 34 In Vestigios the object holds a new type of agency, more weighty than an object of mourning, or one that metonymically affects our neurologi-

Figure 1.1. Anillos de Elena Kalaidjian. Colección Vestigios. Archivo Memoria Abierta.

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cal processes of memory. 35 Nonliving, yet agential entities, the objects in Vestigios, by virtue of their specific pasts (even as inanimate beings), hold the capacity to impact the viewer. Their power extends from the past subject who once used or owned them, thus their memorial capabilities in the space of the virtual museum displays an agency, makes an impact, by virtue of a relationship that originates with the past subject, now disappeared and silenced. This is not an agency parallel to the human, nor is the object a standin for the past person. To say that it were would undermine the authority and power of movements that seek to find their lost loved ones—who definitively remain in limbo—disappeared not dead. Yet, the object does remain haunted by the past presence of the detenido or desaparecido, even if that person is still alive, known, and can speak. The objects that remain after disappearance are indelibly marked by the past presences of their owners. At the outset of Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Jacques Derrida states: “The name of the one who disappeared must have gotten inscribed somewhere else.” 36 This “somewhere else” forms the basis of his study, in which he inquires into the continual spectral presence of Marx in society. In the case of the disappeared in the post-dictatorship, this “somewhere else” where their name has been inscribed can be seen as the object, their former possessions. The object becomes an intermediary, permitting access to the ghost, creating a means by which to speak with the haunting presence of the disappeared. The haunted nature of these objects is evident in the description of one set of objects that appears in Vestigios, a pairing of nearly identical watches (figure 1.2). The father of the watch’s disappeared owner, Gregorio Marcelo “Guyo” Sember, explains the origin of a watch that appears in Vestigios: “Cuando estaba siendo secuestrado de su hogar, Guyo se quitó el reloj y se lo dio a su padre. Éste se lo puso ese día y no volvió a quitárselo esperando el regreso de su hijo” 37 [When he was being kidnapped from his home, Guyo removed his watch and gave it to his father. His father put it on that day and never again removed it, waiting for the return of his son]. The spectrality of the object is augmented in the continuation of the account: En 1978, el padre de Guyo fue asaltado y los ladrones se llevaron el reloj. Preocupado por que su esposa no note su ausencia compró otro similar. Dos años después el reloj que estaba usando se detuvo y cuando lo llevó al relojero descubrió que otro cliente que estaba allí antes que él tenía el reloj de Guyo. Logró recuperarlo y desde entonces conserva ambos relojes. 38 [In 1978, Guyo’s father was assaulted and the thieves stole his watch. Worried that his wife would note its absence, he bought another similar one. Two years later, the watch he was using stopped working and when he brought it to the watchmaker he discovered that another client that was there before him had

The Museum of Memory

Figure 1.2. Abierta.

25

Relojes de Gregorio Sember. Colección Vestigios. Archivo Memoria

Guyo’s watch. He managed to get it back and from that point on he has kept both watches.]

The return of the watch signals that which Derrida explains regarding the phantom presence of Marx, of the eternal waiting for that-to-come. The imbuing of a material object with the presence of its owner marks that decomposable object with a durability that outlasts the decay experienced by the body. The case of this watch, in its sudden appearance, points to a haunting presence that objects hold in society, a destabilizing memory possibility. Similarly to Vestigios, in the documentary film Nostalgia de la luz, Patricio Guzmán looks to what remains in the wake of the Pinochet dictatorship, exploring the Chilean Atacama desert’s memory possibilities, describing it as a place where “los restos humanos se momifican y los objetos permanecen” 39 [human remains are mummified and objects are frozen in time], a book whose pages are waiting to be read. In the space of the desert, the presence of the past is palpable. The dust-covered, abandoned possessions of those who died in the immense expanse of land still have movement: a jacket sways in the air, and hanging spoons sing; inanimate objects seem not so inanimate. The preservative qualities of the desert provoke astronomers to seek “los

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secretos del cielo” [the secrets of the sky] that “se fueron cayendo sobre nosotros uno a uno como una lluvia transparente” 40 [fall on us, one by one, like a transparent rain]. But they also give hope to those who lost loved ones in Pinochet’s dictatorship, who take to the dry land in an obstinate search for bodily remains. Vicky Saavedra recovers “un pie. Un pie que estaba dentro del zapato” 41 [a foot. A foot that was within a shoe]. This foot, her brother’s, along with other fragments of his skull, yield enough information to determine that Pepe was shot twice, revealing the evidentiary capacity of human remains. But this capacity, a testimonial function, goes beyond the simply evidentiary. Vicky describes her last encounter with her brother: Recordaba esa mirada cariñosa y todo estaba reducido en eso. En unos dientes, en unos padazos de huesos. Y un pie. Un pie que aunque parezca increíble, el último encuentro de mi hermano fue con el pie que yo tuve en mi casa. Porque cuando se encontró la fosa, yo sabía que era el zapato de Pepe. Sabía que era el pie de Pepe. Y a la noche como yo estaba . . . desde la mañan . . . yo me levanté y me puse a cariñar a su pie. Y tenía un olor de descomposición. Estaba en su calcetín. Un calcetín color así conchetino. ¿Granadino? No sé. Un rojo oscuro. Y yo lo saqué de la bolsa. Lo miraba. Después me senté en un sillón de living. Estuve como horas sentada pero en blanco. Totalmente en blanco. No tenía la capacidad de pensar en nada. Estaba tan impactada, shoqueada por eso. Y al día siguiente mi marido se fue a trabajar y pasé toda la mañana con el pie de mi hermano. Estábamos reencontrándonos. Fue el gran reencuentro y quizás la gran desilusión también. Porque en ese momento yo resiento mi conciencia que mi hermano estaba muerto. 42 [I remembered his tender expression and this was all that remained . . . a few teeth and bits of bones. And a foot. And, even if it appears incredible, our final moment together, was with a foot that I had at my house. Because when they found the mass grave, I knew it was Pepe’s shoe. I knew that it was Pepe’s foot. That night, I got up and went to stroke his foot. There was a smell of decay. It was still in his sock. A burgundy sock. A dark red. I took it out of the bag and looked at it. I remained sitting in the living room. I was seated there for some hours, but with my mind in blank. Totally in blank. I didn’t have the capacity to think about anything. I was in total shock. The next day, my husband got up and went to work, and I spent the whole morning with my brother’s foot. We were re-encountering each other. It was the great re-encounter. And perhaps the great disillusionment as well.]

Vicky attempts to find the answers, the representability of the past, in her exchange with her brother’s foot, sock, and shoe. But, it ultimately leads to the disillusioning realization that her brother is dead. No longer disappeared, but confirmed dead. However, this disillusionment may also refer to the incompleteness of the testimony she is able to perceive from the material remains of her brother. We remember Agamben’s paradox: the Muselmann is

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a complete witness, a remnant that functions as a telos between he who can speak (has subjectivity) and he who cannot (the desubjectified, nonhuman, or the dead): “The remnants of Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.” 43 The foot, the shoe, the sock remain between Pepe and Vicky. They are Agamben’s most complete witness—they were there at the scene of violence. But they are also incapable of witnessing. SPECTRAL TESTIMONY: THE TRUTH-TELLING CAPACITY OF OBJECTS If the Muselmann as a “complete witness” is this remnant, in the function of a telos, joining the living being and the speaking being, the human and the inhuman, 44 can the same function be extended to the material remains of the dead? And, can we extend this function to the material objects that are now seen in exhibits such as Vestigios? Here, I turn to a consideration of the object’s ability to testify, asking can the remnant be an object? Or, can an object be the witness to a remnant, a remain? To the ghostly presence of the victim? And, if so, to where is the object joining us? Agamben declares: “We will not understand what Auschwitz is if we do not first understand who or what the Muselmann is—if we do not learn to gaze with him.” 45 Agamben calls on us to look differently at the testimony offered by the Muselmann. The same call is echoed in Derrida’s Specters of Marx and his declaration that we need to learn to live with ghosts. 46 One must accept that the full knowledge of the truth about the disappeared does not exist in a realm in which we are able to openly converse with it. No complete witness exists to answer our questions. We rely on the incomplete memory, this zone of the “in between” in order to construct in the present a knowledge about the past. In the absence of this witness, the object—massproduced, manmade, or even corporal—steps in, to help us (even if incompletely) in our labors to fill the gaps. Derrida writes: The specter, as its name indicates, is the frequency of a certain visibility. But the visibility of the invisible. And visibility, by its essence, is not seen, which is why it remains epekeina tes ousias, beyond the phenomenon or beyond being. The specter is also, among other things, what one imagines, what one thinks one sees and which one projects—on an imaginary screen where there is nothing to see. 47

If objects are haunted by the spectral presences of their previous inhabitants, this hauntology constitutes a repetitive act whose comings and goings cannot be controlled. 48 This haunting presence reveals the destabilizing nature of the object in the case of the disappeared. These objects are specters of

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possibility, 49 a way of accessing memory and destabilizing homogenizing attempts at forgetting in transitional governments. The residual phantom presence that haunts the object and gives it a “specter of possibility” also imbues it with the power of what I term “spectral testimony.” Spectral testimony is a different form of agency that lies in the realm of the just beyond (the más allá), it is the nexus that connects us to Agamben’s notion of the third state of the Muselmann, but also to Derrida’s ruminations on the specter of Marx that continues to haunt society, as well as his thoughts on the always-present fiction of testimony, that yields a phantom real that is ever-present, yet ever just beyond reach. Going back to Avelar’s stance, the unrepresentability of the atrocities, of what really happened, produces a reliance on allegory: all testimonial recountings of the past end up in the realm of the allegorical, a tethering from the present to the third realm of an unrepresentable past. The object, the material, the nonsubject that touched the subjectivity that was once present, is the tether between the two. It was present, but it cannot place into our system of understanding the words that would make coherent these experiences in the past, hence its ongoing spectral nature. In Nostalgia de la luz’s examination of the fundamental connection between the contents of the desert (archeology) and the measurable forms that make up our skies (astronomy), it is not only the material that holds a truthtelling capacity, but light that is equated to being, the measurable frequencies of the calcium in the stars are identified as the same calcium that makes up human bones. One object that appears in Vestigios (figure 1.3), a pendant carved out of bone by a detained prisoner using a coin conjures forth this connection between the materiality of our present on earth and the materiality of the distant past of the cosmos. There is a temporal jump between the present and the past, as explored by Nostalgia de la luz. We are viewing stars that died long ago, yet remain present, gesturing to an ongoing continuity of presences. In Nostalgia de la luz this continuity of presences is palpable. The physical terrain of the Atacama Desert, in its lack of humidity, produces conditions ideal not only for the preservation of material remains, but for the clear connection between earth and the cosmos, for both boil down to a question of light. 50 Astronomer Gaspar Galaz remarks: Todas las experiencias que uno tiene en la vida en realidad, . . . incluso esta conversación, ocurren en el pasado. Aunque sean millonésimas o millésimas de segundos. Pero, claro, o sea la camera que yo estoy mirando ahora está a unos cuantos metros de distancia. Por lo tanto ya está unas millonésimas o algo así digamos de tiempo atrás, en el pasado respecto al tiempo que yo . . . que yo tengo en mi reloj. Porque la señal demora en llegar. La luz de la cámara . . . o la luz tuya . . . refleja y se demora en llegar a mí. Una fracción de segundos,

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Figure 1.3. Colgante realizado en la cárcel por Diana Cruces. Colección Vestigios. Archivo Memoria Abierta.

una fracción muy pequeña de segundos porque la luz es muy, muy rápida. . . . Ésta es la trampa. El presente no existe. 51 [In reality all of our life experiences, . . . including this conversation, happened in the past. Even if it is a matter of millionths or thousandths of a second. The camera I am looking at now is a few meters away and is therefore already several millionths of a second in the past in relation to the time . . . that I have on my watch. Because the signal takes time to arrive. The light from the camera . . . or . . . the light reflected from you reaches me after a moment. A fraction of a second, a very small fraction of a second, as the speed of light is very, very fast. . . . That’s the trick. The present does not exist.]

This link, the “misterio de la ciencia” 52 [mystery of science], both spatial and temporal, as emphasized by the astronomers in the film, creates a nexus between the fleeting present and the seemingly unreachable distance of the origin of things (this material origin being the elements, especially the calcium, that was produced in the stars). The overlay of the specks of light (the stars) upon images of women searching for remains of their disappeared loved ones in the desert augment this connection and conjure forth onto the camera’s plane the simultaneity of existence between past (the measurable light, calcium, and matter from the stars) and present (the calcium in the bodies of those who search, but also in that present in the hidden remains of

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the desert), producing a haunting commingling that is not just imagined, but measurably real and speaks in its own way through the materials that are left behind, even those that remain to be found, for, as archeologist Lautaro Nuñez predicts in the film, one day the remains will appear. And when they do, they will conjure forth that truth which was already present giving a spectral, always-to-come testimony. If the material world was so integral to the detained subject in prison, it also remains integral for those who seek to reconstruct the past, to access the third realm of the unrepresentable, to commingle with ghosts in order to know what happened then, but remains remarkably present in the ever-fleeting today. NOTES 1. Claudia Bernardi, “An Angel Passes By: Silence and Memories at the Massacre of El Mozote,” in Inhabiting Memory: Essays on Memory and Human Rights in the Americas, ed. Marjorie Agosín (San Antonio, TX: Wings Press, 2011), 36. 2. Bernardi, “An Angel Passes By,” 43. 3. Bernardi, “An Angel Passes By,” 29. 4. Marjorie Agosín, “introduction” in Inhabiting Memory: Essays on Memory and Human Rights in the Americas, ed. Marjorie Agosín (San Antonio, TX: Wings Press, 2011), xvi. 5. Francine Masiello, The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 13. 6. Dori Laub, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 80. 7. Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 8. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 9. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 367. 10. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, trans. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Silvia R. Tandeciarz, “Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Postdictatorship Argentina,” PMLA 122, no. 1 (January 2007): 151–69; Elizabeth Jelin and Victoria Langland, Monumentos, memoriales y marcas territoriales (Madrid: Siglo XXI de España, Social Science Research Council, 2003); and James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 11. Margarita Saona, “Plain Things and Space: Metonymy and Aura in Memorials of Social Trauma,” in Layers of Memory and the Discourse of Human Rights: Artistic and Testimonial Practices in Latin America and Iberia, ed. Ana Forcinito, Hispanic Issues On Line 14 (Spring 2014): 73–90. 12. CONADEP, Nunca Más: A Report by Argentina’s National Commission on Disappeared People (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 19. 13. Elain Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 14. Alicia Partnoy, The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, trans. Alicia Partnoy, Lois Athey, and Sandra Braunstein (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998), 46. 15. Partnoy, The Little School, 84. 16. Partnoy, The Little School, 85.

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17. Julia Alvarez, “Preface: Lesson in Survival,” in Partnoy, Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival in Argentina, trans. Alicia Partnoy, Lois Athey, and Sandra Braunstein (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998), 9. 18. Partnoy, The Little School, 84. 19. Partnoy, The Little School, 84. 20. Partnoy, The Little School, 84. 21. Partnoy, The Little School, 84. 22. Partnoy, The Little School, 88. 23. Partnoy, The Little School, 90. 24. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 25. Alicia Kozameh, Pasos bajo el agua (Buenos Aires: Editorial Contrapunto, 1987). 26. Alicia Kozameh, Steps Under Water: A Novel, trans. David E. Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 75. 27. Kozameh, Steps Under Water, 75. 28. Kozameh, Steps Under Water, 72. 29. Kozameh, Steps Under Water, 76. 30. Kozameh, Steps Under Water, 76. 31. Kozameh, Steps Under Water, 78. 32. Kozameh, Steps Under Water, 79. 33. Memoria Abierta, Vestigios, 2011, http://www.memoriaabierta.org.ar/vestigios/index-2. html (accessed October 19, 2012). 34. Masiello, Art of Transition, 13. 35. Elizabeth Jelin writes: “The past leaves traces, in material ruins and evidence, in mnemonic traces in the human neurological system, in individual psychical dynamics, and in the symbolic world. In themselves, these traces do not constitute ‘memory’ unless they are evoked and placed in a context that gives them meaning. A further question thus arises: how to overcome the difficulties involved in accessing these traces, to preclude oblivion. The task involved implies uncovering and revealing, bringing to light the hidden . . . the difficulty is not that few traces remain, or that the past has been destroyed” (State Repression and the Labors of Memory, trans. Judy Rein and Marcial Godoy-Anativia [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 18). 36. Specters (1994), 5. 37. Memoria Abierta, Vestigios. 38. Memoria Abierta, Vestigios. 39. Patricio Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz, directed by Patricio Guzmán, DVD (Chile: Atacama Productions, Blinker Filmproduktion, Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), Icarus Films, 2010. All translations come from DVD subtitles. 40. Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz. 41. Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz. 42. Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz. 43. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 164. 44. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 158–59. 45. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 52. 46. Specters (1994), xvii and xix. 47. Specters (1994), 100–1. 48. Specters (1994), 10. 49. Specters (1994), 12. 50. One must note that all light boils down (within physics) to a matter of frequencies, thus emphasizing the fundamentally material nature of Derrida’s claim that the specter “is the frequency of a certain visibility” (Specters [1994], 100). 51. Gaspar Galaz in Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz. 52. Guzmán, Nostalgia de la luz.

Chapter Two

The Bright Future of the Ghost Memory in the Work of Javier Marías Isabel Cuñado

Javier Marías (Madrid, b. 1951) is unquestionably the contemporary Spanish author who best captures critics’ attention and praise, both inside and outside his home country.* Since Corazón tan blanco became a bestseller in the 1990s, enthusiastic reactions from the international press have not ceased. 1 Although this should be less of a surprise in the European context, where Marías’s novels have received numerous awards, the warm reception given by the US literary press is nonetheless remarkable. In recent years Marías has earned glowing reviews that not only describe him as the best Spanish author today—a rare talent only comparable to the best world literary eminences— but place him on the list of possible candidates for the Nobel Prize. 2 Indeed, Marías is the only living Spanish novelist, along with Arturo Pérez-Reverte, to have seen most of his works published in translation in the United States. This is an important landmark, considering that the US publishing business is noticeably closed to literature in translation. 3 The significance of Marías’s work is manifold, as evidenced by the growing scholarship devoted to it. But if there is something that it consistently and suggestively reveals is the versatility of the ghost and its relevance as a social entity. From the dead speaking timidly in Marías’s first short-story, “La vida y la muerte de Marcelino Iturriaga” (1968), 4 to the renowned and multiple ghosts of Los enamoramientos (2011), 5 Marías’s narrative has dealt for four decades with haunting, that disturbing territory that challenges the boundaries delimiting categories apparently distinct and stable, such as life and death, past and present, the visible and the invisible, justice and impunity. The ghost is, in fact, the key and recurring figure to articulate the historical, ethical, and affective discourse in his extensive and prolific narrative. 6 As a 33

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result, his narrative illustrates Giorgio Agamben’s assertion that “[s]pectrality is a form of life.” 7 Marías has become a master of exploring the paradoxical “evidence of things not seen,” that is, of tracing those forces that are apparently not there and yet disturb daily life, challenging the most established assumptions, and demanding the “recognition of something more.” 8 In this exploration of the connections between death and memory, traditions as diverse as those of Jorge Manrique, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Jorge Luis Borges are echoed and incorporated into a unique perspective that redefines them within a postmodern paradigm. Ultimately, Marías’s novels recognize the difficulty of enunciating the traumatic effect of a violent past, and propose living with ghosts as an act of posthumous justice, and haunting as a form of memory. In recent years, Spain’s cultural production has also experienced an increased interest in the study of memory in its connection with history. A growing number of works of literature focus on the representation of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. 9 Within these works, special attention is paid to the expression of the spectral in literature and film of the democratic era as a result of the repression of traumatic experiences. The contention is that the ghost is a symptom of the desmemoria or disremembering following the war and Franco’s forty years of dictatorial regime, two episodes that, partially or wholly, have been witnessed by several generations of Spaniards still alive. The generation of writers born in the 1950s, to which Marías belongs, grew up and started to write during the dictatorship, which censored narratives that were critical of Francoism. With the rapid changes undertaken during la Transición, the years of the transition to democracy in late 1970s and early 1980s, Spanish society adopted an attitude of escapism that pushed them to look with optimism to a new and promising future, while refusing to fix or even consider the wrongs of the past. In the cultural scene, the movida epitomized the new sense of freedom, giving way to a new generation of urban artists: The very rapid growth in the appreciation of democratic values gave rise, as a natural consequence of the Transition, to the suppression of censorship in artistic circles—which had been in force since the end of the war—and the recovery of the freedom of the press, which had disappeared after Franco’s victory. In that new climate, almost everything seemed possible, from the making and exhibition of pornographic films to the birth of a newspaper of the quality of El País. 10

Writers were no exception to this generalized tendency of change and, as a result, there were very few novels dealing with historical memory during those years. Instead, the generation of New Novelists (to which Marías belonged) turned toward self-reflexive novels, oftentimes influenced by French and British literature. The year 1992, with the hosting of the Olympic Games

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and various other international celebrations, would mean the end of a period of glorification of the present and the entrance into a period of economic recession and disenchantment. At the turn of the new century and after two decades of fast economic, social, and cultural transformation, many of the writers born in the 1950s felt the urge to turn toward collective memory and, thus, to scrutinize without fear the Francoist years, a period that was prematurely and unsuccessfully buried during the transition years. The Law of Historical Memory or Ley de la Memoria Histórica, passed in 2007 under the presidency of socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, was a reflection of this change in social sensibilities, at least at the institutional level. This law grants descendants of the Republican victims certain rights, such as the exhumation and identification of their family remains from mass graves. While this law was disliked by the conservative party (Partido Popular) under the pretext of opening old wounds, it was considered deficient by the left and nationalist parties. In any case, the law has served to bring to the political and social arena the long delayed debate over the need to restitute the memory of the victims of the war on the Republican side. In the early 1990s, Jacques Derrida proposed the notion of “hauntology” to refer to a new social discipline dedicated to the study of the specter. Based on this notion, the French philosopher demands a politics of memory based on the acknowledgment of ghosts which, in his opinion, are still haunting post-communist Europe. 11 Following this suggestion, other scholars have reflected on the implications of the specter in the study of social practices of memory. From the consideration of ghosts as social and historical phenomena, Avery F. Gordon claims: If haunting describes that which appears to be not there but is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is just the sign, or the empirical evidence if you like, that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. 12

Joan Ramon Resina and Ulrich Winter place ghosts at the center of the debate by claiming that they “are requirements for a critical approach to the politics of memory, and not least that of the Spanish Transition.” 13 Considering democratic Spain as a casa encantada, or haunted house, Resina revises the uses and abuses of the places of memory as sites where Spanish society relates to its recent history. 14 In the same way, Jo Labanyi suggests that after four decades of dictatorship, Spanish society is confronted with the challenge of having to make reparations—symbolic and material—to those who have been deprived of voice and memory for so long. 15 This should not be done through a mere incorporation of historical memory to the present, but rather through the interrogation of the process of recovery. 16 For Labanyi, the trope

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of haunting in novels and films has “achieved a productive balance between acknowledgment of the past and a desire for change through their understanding that what matters about the past is its unfinished business, which requires critical reflection and action in the present.” 17 Marías himself believes that some of the problems Spain is facing during this new democratic era are the result of a past forced into oblivion, from which derives a sense of generalized and inherited impunity. As a result, according to Marías, the past is still present, always ready to make a return. 18 At the same time that this social process of oblivion was taking place, the spectral in Marías’s novels of the 1980s and 1990s is not explicitly related to a historical account, partly because there is no desire to reflect openly on Spain’s painful past. Instead, the ghost is represented within the realm of the family, which acts as a metaphor for society. Corazón tan blanco, Marías’s most popular novel, vehemently expresses that the specter often lives at home. 19 The novel portrays the aftermath of a crime perpetrated and silenced within the family, shedding light onto Freud’s notion of the uncanny or unheimlich, posited as the strange happening within the familiar. 20 By the end of the novel, Juan discovers that his father is responsible for the death of several women in the family, a fact which he prefers to live with instead of denouncing it publicly. But until that final revelation takes place, the protagonist moves blindly in a reality marked by premonitions of disaster, and is haunted by the ghosts of a censored past. Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí is another story of haunting. 21 After concealing the circumstances that led to the sudden death of his lover, Víctor hides and spies on the family of the deceased, who are disturbed by the absence of Marta as much as by the absence of explanation for it. Burdened by his own responsibility, Víctor himself becomes subject to haunting, which in his own words “no es otra cosa que la condenación del recuerdo, que los hechos y las personas recurran y se aparezcan indefinidamente y no cesen del todo ni pasen” 22 [is just another name for the curse of memory, for the fact that events and people recur and reappear indefinitely and never entirely go away, the may never completely leave or abandon us]. Remembering and silencing an act of injustice while others are ignorant of it is a constant motif in Marías’s fictional world, all the way to his most recent novel, Los enamoramientos. Repetition can also be an expression of the uncanny. Marías’s narrative is, indeed, haunted by the double, a type of recurrence revealing an incomprehensible reality. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the double may represent the expressions of the censured id, which themselves can be caused by fear of a social prohibition. Otto Rank’s study has shed light on the literary representation of this phenomenon since the beginning of the twentieth century. 23 The double also challenges the chronological notion of time. There are many reverberations between the idea of circular time portrayed by Jorge Luis Borges’s Historia de la eternidad and the ghostly temporality

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present in Marías’s Todas las almas and Negra espalda del tiempo. 24 Borges suggests that the number of human emotions and vicissitudes is limited and, therefore, the experiences of individuals can coincide. The overlapping of experiences results in the analogy of destinies and a cyclical view of time. Both aspects are recurrent in Marías’s work, and are key in the contextualization of the spectral, from short-stories such as “La canción de Lord Rendall” and “La dimisión de Santiesteban,” to Los enamoramientos. 25 The affinity of experiences and the continuity between individuals generates a nonchronological sense of time. Negra espalda del tiempo foregrounds and theorizes this vision of ghostly temporality that is, otherwise, displayed throughout this narrative. This experimental and intensely spectral novel develops the idea of the repeated return of the past. This is done through the Shakespearean image of the dark back of time, the dimension shared by the dead and the living, as well as by reality and its written representation. For Marías, the dark back of time is “una esfera que no es temporal propiamente y en la quién sabe si no se hallará la escritura, o quizá solamente la ficción.” 26 [a sphere that isn’t precisely temporal, a sphere in which writing, or perhaps only fiction—who knows—may be found.] Writing takes place in this strange temporality, and is conceived not so much as an attempt to capture reality but rather to act as a mask that both represents and covers reality, in the process of reinterpreting it. In this literature, representation comes to the fore and reality stays behind as a background that is often difficult to reach. Texts are venerated and even fetishized, to the extent that they are a material trace of the past. In fact, texts such as manuscripts, writings, and old editions are among the objects that enable phantasmagoric associations in this narrative. Walter Benjamin noticed that “the cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face.” 27 Marías’s protagonists are often fascinated by old books, photographs of dead writers, and other antiques that they collect and examine with devotion. In Todas las almas and Negra espalda del tiempo, for instance, they feel haunted by books, to the extent that these individuals enter an enchanted space where the real and the imaginary, the past and the present, overlap and interact. Photography, whose spectral quality renders it another privileged means to connect with the past, has a dominant role in Marías’s portrayal of the fantastic. The material reproduction of photographies in several novels—Negra espalda del tiempo and Tu rostro mañana 28 —invites the reader to share the narrator’s meticulous examination as well as to experience the pictures’ spectral effect. Ultimately, the fetishization of vestiges facilitates a ritual that allows the individual to connect with a time he didn’t directly experience, while revealing the present’s desire to let the dead speak. One more example of the evocative capacity of photography is provided by the amusing and original collection of essays Vidas escritas, a

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series of humorously interpreted biographies of renowned writers admired by Marías. 29 In spite of their diverse origins, these authors have one thing in common: they are all dead. Each essay is accompanied by a picture that is carefully and thoroughly scrutinized by the narrator. Marías’s eye makes a clear effort to look for strange signs and inconspicuous details which could provide new information, or confirm what we already know, about the personality of the portrayed. This inquisitive look opens up the space for further connotations and hypothesis, and it suggests that there is always something that remains unspoken, or that ghosts continue speaking if we are able to pay attention to them. What makes Vidas escritas a captivating book is, above all, its vibrant will to humanize the lives of the laureate writers by ironically examining their idiosyncrasies. But also, it is noteworthy the unreserved affection it distills toward the spectral quality of all the dead. Whereas one had to read between the lines and through metaphors to relate the ghostly with Spain’s traumatic past in the novels from the 1980s and 1990s (such as El siglo, 30 Corazón tan blanco and Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí), the historical dimension and political commentary comes to the surface in Tu rostro mañana. 31 This trilogy reflects a significant change in attitude toward the memory of the civil war and its role in Marías’s literature. What was once unspeakable is now expressed through words, more specifically, the words of the ghost. The ghost reminds us of a haunting legacy: the ongoing effects of past injustice on the present. In Tu rostro mañana, for the first time in this narrative, themes as characteristic as betrayal, crime, and memory are connected openly to the civil war. Thus, the traumatic past finally comes to the front, and the relation between memory and the spectral is developed within a historical setting, reflecting Marías’s opinion that “una guerra es pública, ahí hay que recordar y contar” 32 [a war is a public affair, one needs to remember and tell]. Different from the father’s generation, which directly witnessed the civil war, Marías discusses this episode through the lens of “postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch’s term for the experience of a generation marked by their parents’ living through traumatic historic events. 33 Deza, the narrator and protagonist of Tu rostro mañana, appeals to the remembrance of those victims of the war who were left behind with a silenced story. As depository and interpreter of these stories, he becomes the link that connects the dead and the living. 34 Ultimately, the trilogy is a long chronicle of crimes perpetrated through time and space, from Lorca and Andreu Nin, to the family of the protagonist. 35 These deaths echo one another to the extent of creating a ghostly resonance that condemns the view of the victims as a series of lives and deaths that leave no traces. But also, and foremost, the ghostly reminds us of the need come to terms with a haunted present, possibly the best vantage point from which to reflect critically on the violent past. Haunting prevents a self-content empathy for the traumatic past that regards it as a set of experiences that no longer affect the

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present. As Labanyi puts it, “the texts that avoid realism and focus on the past as haunting, rather than as a reality immediately accessible to us, retain a sense of the difficulty of understanding what it was like to live that past, as well as making us reflect on how the past interpellates the present.” 36 Examining books, pictures, and oral testimonies of the war survivors, Deza finally problematizes the possibility of a complete and reliable account of the past. As Labanyi aptly reminds us, the trope of haunting is a selfreflexive trend that questions the ability of narrative to capture reality. 37 The three volumes of Tu rostro mañana constitute an intense and emotional commentary on the causes and effects of violence, as much as on the difficulty of its recovery and conveyance through discourse. The concern for justice and ethics reappears in Los enamoramientos, although in this case not in relation to historical events. 38 The novel’s title is to a certain extent deceitful. Infatuations are only the background on which the main themes converge: the causes of death, the contingency of human vicissitudes, the relativity of truth and the contagion of impunity. Death and the surrounding circumstances are framed within an ethical deliberation where the ghost once more plays a crucial role. The story superficially follows the formula of a crime novel. The plot is constructed around the exploration by María, the narrator-protagonist, of the motives of a crime. The sentimental drama, although entwined in the crime, is secondary. The plot could be summarized as follows: every morning at a café in Madrid, María observes with curiosity the apparently happy couple made up of Luisa Alday and Miguel Desvern. One day the couple stops coming to the café and María finds out through the paper that Desvern has been stabbed to death by a mad beggar. After meeting the widow, María also becomes acquainted with Javier Díaz-Varela, a close friend of the former couple. Over time, he and María meet again and eventually become lovers. After accidentally hearing Javier and his partner Ruibérriz speaking of having conspired to have a beggar kill Desvern, María starts suspecting that Javier’s real interest may have been getting together with Luisa. Before ending his affair with María, Javier explains to her that the real reason he is behind the murder of his friend is that Desvern himself pleaded with him to facilitate a sudden end to his life upon learning that he had an incurable disease. After this troubling confession, María has to confront two possible versions of Desvern’s sudden death. In the final scene two years later, María runs into Javier and Luisa, now a married couple and, not too surprised by the finding, she decides to remain silent about what she knows in order not to interfere in the new order of things. The closing scene reveals the striking breach between the different individual perspectives: the omniscient Javier, the competing versions held by María, and the incognizant Luisa. Javier is not who he seems to be, and neither is María, as Luisa ignores that María was once Javier’s lover. The

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multiple views or perspectivismo prevailing in this open ending precludes a definitive determination about the true cause of Miguel’s death and, as a result, emphasizes ethical relativism about the crime. All of this confirms María’s view that “nada [es] del todo seguro, la verdad siempre es maraña” 39 [Nothing was quite certain, the truth is always a tangled mess]. Facts are often distorted by their account, making it difficult to distinguish truth from appearance. The narration displays the existence of a multiplicity of partial angles on reality. No one is able to capture a complete view—except, arguably, the ghost. As the protagonist suggests, “no hay historia sin puntos ciegos ni contradicciones ni sombras ni fallos, lo mismo las reales que las inventadas, y en ese aspecto—el de la oscuridad que circunda y envuelve a cualquier narración—, no importaba nada cuál fuera cuál” 40 [There is no story, whether real or invented, without blind spots or contradictions or obscurities or mistakes, and in that respect—that of the darkness that surrounds and encircles any narrative—it didn’t really matter which was which]. Although the novel shows the influence of crime fiction, the end deviates from the conventions of the genre, which typically concludes with the resolution of the motives of the crime. Instead, María cannot find out the real reason behind the murder and, unable to distinguish what is real from what is interpreted, she accepts her state of ignorance with skepticism. As in Corazón tan blanco, the protagonist in Los enamoramientos is an unintentional addressee of the confession of a crime, but decides to keep it secret in order, as she puts it, not to disturb the universe. 41 This passivity is supported by the opinion that “la impunidad del mundo es tan inabarcable, tan antigua y larga y ancha que hasta cierto punto nos da lo mismo que se le añada un milímetro más” 42 [There are so many unpunished crimes in the world; indeed, they cover an area so vast, so ancient, so broad and wide that, up to a point, what do we care if a millimetre more is added to it?]. As other protagonists in this narrative, María is not concerned about public justification and justice but rather about understanding the effects that transgression has on individuals, both those who suffer it and those who know about it and, thus, carry the burden of responsibility. In both novels, knowing a secret implies being subject to the constant persecution of its memory, and falling to its enchantment. Carrying the disturbing burden of what remains unresolved is the way of the ghost, which often returns as an echo or a premonition: Cuanto ha sido dicho se recupera y resuena, si no en la vigilia sí en la duermevela y los sueños, donde el orden no importa, y siempre permanece agitándose y latiendo como si fuera un enterrado vivo o un muerto que reaparece porque en realidad no murió, ni en Eylau ni en el camino de vuelta ni colgado de un árbol ni en ningún otro lugar. Lo dicho nos acecha y revisita a veces como los fantasmas. 43

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[Everything that has been said to us resonates and lingers, if not when we’re awake, then as we drift off to sleep or in our dreams, where the order of things doesn’t matter, and it remains there tossing and turning and pulsating as it if were someone who had been buried alive or perhaps a dead man who reappears because he didn’t actually die, either in Eylau or on the road back or having been hanged from a tree or something else. What has been said continues to watch us and occasionally revisits us, as ghosts do.] 44

Thus, in both Los enamoramientos and Corazón tan blanco, individuals can elude public accountability but cannot escape the legacy of a past injustice and, as a result, the ghost returns to disturb the apparent order of things. Death and its circumstances—its inevitability, its causes, and its incomprehensibility—is the central theme in Los enamoramientos. In fact, it could be argued that this novel is a prolongation of the meditation mortis so brilliantly started in Tu rostro mañana, and notably marked by the views of the poets Jorge Manrique and Rilke. Los enamoramientos constitutes an extensive and moving homage to the memory of the author’s father, Julián Marías, and of his friend Peter Wheeler—both deceased during the writing of the novel—and is also a tribute to their respective experiences in the Spanish War and, more concretely, to the narration and transmission of those experiences into stories. Continuing with the reflection on death, Los enamoramientos presents it as an unpredictable and abrupt end on human trajectory, the last piece of a chain of fortuitous causes and effects. Behind the reflection on death’s contingency lays the estrangement produced by the repetition of human events, idea which, again, invites us to see a connection with Borges. The stories of Colonel Chabert (Colonel Chabert, by Honoré de Balzac) and Anne de Breuil (The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas) illustrate the repetition of destinies. Both show cases of spouses who return home after being taken for dead and, once there, face the confusion and worry of their partners, who had remade their lives without them. These famous intertexts show clear parallelisms with the story of Desvern and Luisa, and become a historical reference to situate and interpret crime within human conditions that repeat through time and space. At the same time, the literary references serve to typify the persistence of the specter: No desaparece del todo el nombre de Miguel Desvern. . . . Como tampoco se van del todo los nombres ficticios del Coronel Chabert y de Madame Ferraud, del Conde de la Fère y de Milady De Winter. . . . Sí, se equivocan los muertos al regresar, y aun así casi todos lo hacen, no cejan y pugnan por convertirse en el lastre de los vivos hasta que éstos se los sacuden para avanzar. Nunca eliminamos todos los vestigios, no obstante, nunca logramos que la materia pasada enmudezca de veras y para siempre. 45

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On the other hand, the connection with Balzac deepens the historical dimension of the specter in Marías’s novel. Colonel Chabert’s apparent death is supported by a death certificate. It has a date documented by the history books and, therefore, it is impossible to revert officially. 47 The colonel makes an emphasis on the historical facticity of death because that is what hinders him from recovering his identity and returning to society. It is precisely the data that marks the completion of his life and, as a result, forces him to be a ghost thereafter. As he puts it: “I’ve been buried beneath the dead, but now I’m buried beneath the living; beneath certificates, facts.” 48 Connecting with these thoughts, the poetics of the fantastic in Marías is increasingly rooted in a historical consideration. If “a specter always carries with it a date wherever it goes,” it is declaring its historicity or its roots in a historical event (a war, in the case of Chabert) and it is often carrying with it a political subtext that has been obliterated by the historical annals. 49 This is vital because it underscores the notion that the ghost is a crossroads where subjective experience and history overlap and feed each other. The ghost speaks of and for the innumerable victims who are expelled from history, when their deaths stop counting or their stories are forgotten. Along with speaking of a lingering past, ghosts expose those gaps and suppressions in our recording of the past that produce exiles from history. Finally, the ghost in Los enamoramientos has a metaphoric dimension as a juncture between realms in constant tension: oblivion and remembrance, the visible and the invisible, crime and impunity. As is the case in previous novels, the ghost is the figure around which all the main themes converge: the volatility of death and its repercussions, the weight of collective responsibility, and the lack of certainty around human endeavors. There is, however, a small novelty in the slightly double view of the ghost in Los enamoramientos. Here the ghost presents a paradox. On the one hand, lies the speculation that one must let the dead go and even forget them to avoid the discomfort ghosts bring to the living when they return and discover that lives have resumed without them. 50 But, along with this speculation, remains the certainty that the dead end up returning in spectral forms, and that “nada desaparece ni se va nunca del todo, permanecen débiles ecos y huidizas reminiscencias que surgen en cualquier instante como fragmentos de lápidas en la sala de un museo que nadie visita” 51 [It’s also true to say that nothing entirely disappears, there remain faint echoes and elusive memories that can

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surface at any moment like the fragments of gravestones in the room in a museum that no one visits]. The overarching view in the story, ultimately, is the recognition of the transformative influence of ghosts. While it is true that in Marías’s literature “el único ser que tiene acceso a la verdad [es] el fantasma” [the only being that has access to the truth is the ghost], Los enamoramientos challenges the claim that “el fantasma no influye en el espacio-tiempo de los vivientes” 52 [the ghost does not affect the space and time of the living]. In fact, Los enamoramientos constitutes a forceful case about the traces left by death and the dead in the world of the living. Indeed, the novel is a persuasive commentary of the effect of ghosts and its tradition in literature, a tradition that serves to extend the reflection on how we are in debt with the past. The ghosts in Marías’s work are a perfect example of “larval specters,” those who do not accept their condition and, like Colonel Chabert, look for the people who have relegated them to their spectral status in order to make them realize the pains they have undergone. 53 Not only do specters who originated in a troublesome past return cyclically in Marías’s narrative; also those alive learn to count with their eventual appearance and exist under the constant vigilance of their arrival. Like all ghosts, Marías’s come to remind us about a traumatic past. But more significantly, these are ghosts with a future, to the extent that the protagonists prefer to conjure them and live under their haunting rather than take public action to repair a past injustice. In this sense, the most profound and lasting enamoramiento in this work is not the one happening among the living, but rather the one binding the living and the dead, that is, the infatuation for the ghost. The love for the ghost echoes Agamben’s question: What do we owe to the dead? “The work of love in recollecting the one who is dead,” Kierkegaard writes, “is the work of the most disinterested, free, and faithful love.” But it is certainly not the easiest. The dead, after all, not only ask nothing from us, but they also seem to do everything possible in order to be forgotten. This, however, is precisely why the dead are perhaps the most demanding objects of love. We are defenseless and delinquent with respect to the dead; we flee from and neglect them. 54

For four decades, Marías’s fiction has become a powerful expression of the spectral, that alternative existence which speaks of a different way of seeing the world, one that unceasingly links us with the past and reminds us of its ongoing effect. They may be the literary and famous ghosts; or the writers’ voices returning in their verses; or the photographs and words of lost friends and relatives. In all instances, the specter unveils a retrospective truth rising from the rigor of its already complete and irreversible existence. The memory and influx of the dead is more than a circumstance; it is an existential state, and the space reserved for their specters a revered one. But the spectral is also a social condition, as seen in this narrative’s eloquent need to

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create a space for the dead out of an affective and ethical responsibility. In postmodern time, marked as it is by the crisis of meanings and the loss of certainties, paradoxically, the ghost reveals a posthumous reality, one that could prove valuable for the future. Marías’s narrative confirms the ghost’s double promise: its potential to exert change on the present, and its auspicious prospect in a world ever haunted by ceaseless violence. NOTES * I would like to thank Michael James for his help in translating this chapter. 1. Javier Marías, Corazón tan blanco (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1992). 2. Wyatt Mason, “A Man Who Wasn’t There: The clandestine greatness of Javier Marías,” New Yorker, November 14, 2005, 90–94, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/14/aman-who-wasnt-there (accessed March 3, 2015). 3. See Stephen Kinzer on the relatively scarce reception of world literature in translation in the United States publishing market (“America Yawns at Foreign Fiction,” New York Times, Arts and Ideas Supplement, July 26, 2003); and Isabel Cuñado on the reception in the United States of Marías and other Spanish contemporary authors in translation (“Estado de eclipse: La narrativa española contemporánea en Estados Unidos,” Quimera: Revista de Literatura 273 [2006]: 52–57). 4. Javier Marías, “La vida y la muerte de Marcelino Iturriaga,” Barcelona, Noticiero Universal, April 19, 1968. 5. Javier Marías, Los enamoramientos (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011). 6. The term ghost is, indeed, a favorite in the titles of numerous writings by Marías, from the book of essays Literatura y fantasma (Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 1993), to the weekly section of the El País Semanal named Zona fantasma. 7. Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedetella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 39. 8. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 195, 206. 9. A notable number of authors born in the 1950s and 1960s and, thus, contemporaries of Marías, are taking part of this narrative tendency: Almudena Grandes, Dulce Chacón, Manuel Rivas, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Carme Riera and Javier Cercas, among others. 10. Santos Juliá, “History, Politics and Culture, 1975–1996,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture, ed. David T. Gies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 111. 11. Specters (1993), 37–38. 12. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 13. Joan Ramon Resina, “Introduction,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Resina (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 5. 14. Joan Ramon Resina and Ulrich Winter, “Prólogo,” in Casa encantada. Lugares de memoria en la España constitucional, 1978–2004, ed. Resina and Winter (Frankfurt am Main and Madrid: Veurvert/Iberoamericana, 2005), 9–14. 15. Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past?” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 80. 16. Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficult of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 106. 17. Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,” 109. 18. Marías in Gérard de Cortanze, “Javier Marías: L’Espagne est en fausse paix avec ellemême,” Magazine Littéraire 330 (March 1995): 26–28. 19. Marías, Corazón tan blanco.

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20. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (New York: Penguin: 2003). 21. Javier Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1994). 22. Marías, Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, 91; Marías, Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me, trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: New Directions, 2001), 67. 23. Otto Rank, The Double (New York: New American Library, 1979). 24. Jorge Luis Borges, Historia de la eternidad, Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1965); Javier Marías, Todas las almas (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1989); and Negra espalda del tiempo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998). 25. For an extensive study of the parallelisms between Borges’s view on time and Marías, see Isabel Cuñado, El espectro de la herencia: La narrativa de Javier Marías (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 113–38. 26. Marías, Negra espalda del tiempo, 363; Marías, Dark Black of Time, trans. Esther Allen (New York: New Directions, 2001), 301. 27. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 226. 28. Javier Marías, Tu rostro mañana, vol. 1 Fiebre y lanza (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2002); vol. 2. Baile y sueño (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2004); and vol. 3. Veneno y sombra y adiós (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2007). 29. Javier Marías, Vidas escritas (Madrid: Siruela, 1992). 30. Javier Marías, El siglo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983). 31. Marías, Tu rostro mañana, vol. 1, 2, and 3. 32. María Luisa Blanco, “Javier Marías, todas las voces,” Babelia, El País, September 29, 2007. 33. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1997). 34. Marías, Tu rostro mañana, vol. 1, 224. 35. Andreu Nin (1892–1937), the leader of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), was arrested, tortured, and assassinated in obscure circumstances after POUM was declared illegal by the Republican government in 1937. The conflicting versions of his death and whereabouts, together with Lorca’s, are revisited by Marías to evoke the lingering ghost of the civil war. For more on the latest details on Nin’s death, see article by Ángel Viñas, “Un agente estalinista, cerebro del asesinato de Nin,” El País, April 22, 2007, http://elpais.com/ diario/2007/04/22/domingo/1177213961_850215.html (accessed July 6, 2015). 36. Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,” 112. 37. Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,” 112. 38. The novel was awarded with the prestigious Premio Nacional de Narrativa in 2012. Causing great stir in the literary world, Marías rejected this prize in an act of coherence with his opinion held for years with respect to the acceptance of awards coming from state institutions. 39. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 398; Marías, The Infatuations , trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 335 40. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 357; Marías, The Infatuations , trans. Costa, 299. 41. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 397. 42. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 257–58. Marías, The Infatuations , trans. Costa, 209. 43. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 354–55. 44. Marías, The Infatuations , trans. Costa, 296. 45. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 362. 46. Marías, The Infatuations , trans. Costa, 303. 47. Honoré de Balzac, Colonel Chabert, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: New Directions, 1997), 19. 48. Balzac, Colonel Chabert, 26. 49. Agamben, Nudities, 39 50. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 331, 341, 400. 51. Marías, Los enamoramientos, 361–62; Marías, The Infatuations , trans. Costa, 302. 52. Elide Pittarello, “Contar con el miedo,” in Javier Marías: La conciencia dilatada, ed. Alexis Grohmann and Domingo Ródenas, Ínsula 785–786 (2012): 13–14. 53. Agamben, Nudities, 40.

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54. Agamben, Nudities, 39. Agamben’s quotation itself includes a note with the bibliographic reference to Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. H. V. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Chapter Three

The Spectrality of Political Violence Exhuming Guatemala’s Haunted Past in Tanya María Barrientos’s Family Resemblance and Sylvia Sellers’s When the Ground Turns in its Sleep Susana S. Martínez

In the film El Norte (1983) by Gregory Nava, Rosita Xuncax, a young indigenous woman is haunted by the ghosts of her Mayan parents who were killed by Guatemalan soldiers during the internal, armed conflict. At her father’s burial, she refers to the interstitial space between life and death and the need for home: “We do not come to earth to live. We come to earth to sleep. We come to sleep and dream. All things are lent to us as we pass by on this earth. Tomorrow or the next day. Whatever is your wish O giver of life. We shall go home to you.” 1 In the following scene, soldiers storm through the village, taking her mother, along with other villagers, to a certain death. Twice orphaned, Rosita and her brother Enrique flee across the border into Mexico then crawl through rat infested sewers connecting Tijuana to San Diego. The ghosts of Arturo and Lupe Xuncax appear to Rosita as she dies from typhus in Los Angeles. Her mother pats out handmade tortillas on Rosita’s modern stove, acknowledging that life in the United States is extremely difficult. Her father offers her a basket of flowers and a dead fish, symbols that prepare Rosa for her own death. These family apparitions confirm that the siblings are not truly free in El Norte, which is reflected in Rosita’s final words to her brother, “In our own land, we have no home. They want to kill us. . . . When will we find a home, Enrique? Maybe when we die, we’ll find a home.” 2 In fact, their lives in the shadows are as precarious and exploited as their parents’ were in Guatemala. The film’s final scene underscores the cyclical, deadly nature of economic exploitation when Enrique 47

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competes for a daily wage, echoing his father’s assertion that to the rich, the peasant is just a strong pair of arms. The brief but powerful haunting scenes in El Norte unite two interrelated ideas: the need for reckoning with ghostly state-sponsored violence and seeking a final resting place. As political and economic exiles fleeing genocidal violence, Rosita and Enrique practically live as unseen ghosts even before death, thus personifying Judith Butler’s notion of precarious or ungrievable life. In this chapter, I propose that Rosita’s death metaphorically haunts a generation of Guatemalan Americans that grew up in El Norte yet forge strong ties to Guatemala. Although Tanya Maria Barrientos’s Family Resemblance (2003) and Sylvia Sellers-García’s When the Ground Turns in its Sleep (2007) do not invoke the trope of spectrality as overtly as Nava’s film, I assert that the novels represent a reckoning with a haunted past while searching for a way to deepen their personal connections to Guatemala. 3 A hauntological framework is valuable for reckoning with ghostly absences and the silencing of the country’s state-sponsored strategies of death. In The Spectralities Reader, María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren note, “it is vital to acknowledge that notions of spectrality may facilitate the understanding and addressing of not only historical injustices and their commemoration in personal and/or collective memory, but also of situations of injustice and disempowerment arising in and from a present characterized by diffuse processes of globalization.” 4 Also calling attention to unsettled matters, Colin Davis affirms, “The ghosts of fiction generally return to haunt us because something is amiss. A crime has gone undetected, an offense has escaped punishment. Once the wrong has been righted, the ghost can return to its proper domain and leave the earth to the living. While the ghost still haunts us, something remains unsettled.” 5 Haunted by the legacy of genocidal violence, the protagonists of Barrientos’s and Sellers-García’s novels reverse Rosita and Enrique’s arduous journey to lay to rest the ghosts of their parents while personally reconnecting with this haunted space. GHOSTLY IMAGININGS OF GUATEMALA’S PAST: FAMILY SECRETS AND LANGUAGE LOSS IN FAMILY RESEMBLANCE For Juanita de León, the protagonist of Barrientos’s Family Resemblance, absence has always been a ghostly presence in her life. Having lost her mother, an artist heavily influenced by Mayan culture, at age twelve, during a violent shooting in her studio, Nita’s story embodies Avery F. Gordon’s classification of “ghostly matters”; “[t]he way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to

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Figure 3.1. During an exhumation, Doña Clara holds a photograph of her husband whose remains are being unearthed. He was fifty years old when soldiers shot him in 1982. Nebaj, Quiché, 2000. Photograph by Jonathan Moller.

experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition.” 6 Nita’s mother’s violent death sealed off key aspects of Nita’s developing self-identity. Only later as an adult, for example, does she learn that her father suspected the incident to be a political crime tied to the couple’s leftist

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allegiances in Guatemala. Because she knows so little about her parents lives in Guatemala, Nita studies her parents wedding photos: The shot looks like something that might have appeared in Life magazine, a perfect portrait of that tidy and tailored era, a scene so universal that it could have been any couple anywhere. But this couple happened to be my parents, and the wedding happened to be in Guatemala, a tiny nation in such turmoil that before I was born my parents had to flee. They never told me the full story of why they packed their things and left their friends and family for good. . . . I’m hypnotized by the scenes in the album, drawn so deeply into a world I’ve pieced together in my imagination. 7

The wedding photos and her mother’s personal belongings that she treasures are examples of what Marianne Hirsch names “points of memory”; “points of intersection between past and present, memory and postmemory, personal remembrance and cultural recall.” 8 They help her connect to an unknown past and lead her toward what Gordon calls “transformative recognition.” In addition to mourning the loss of her mother, Nita mourns a deeper, cultural loss due to the fact that she does not speak Spanish and lacks familiarity with her Guatemalan roots. She experiences this linguistic and cultural loss as a ghostly presence because her parents deliberately withheld their Spanish language and political experiences in Guatemala from her; “looking back I realize it was just one of the million things my parents did to fit in. Their English could never lose the sound of the Spanish they’d spoken before they moved here, but they worked hard to make every other aspect of their lives, and mine, ultra-American.” 9 This ghostly presence not only heightens her awareness of the absences in her life but simultaneous pushes her toward recovering what has long been missing. Borrowing from Jacques Derrida, Gordon emphasizes: (T)he ghost is primarily a symptom of what is missing. It gives notice not only to itself but also to what it represents. What it represents is usually a loss, sometimes of life, sometimes of a path not taken. From a certain vantage point the ghost also simultaneously represents a future possibility, a hope . . . the ghost is alive, so to speak. We are in relation to it and it has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it a hospitable memory out of a concern for justice. 10

Furthermore, this ghostly awareness of what is missing prompts Nita to rethink her identity as a Guatemalan-American and what Hirsh labels “the generation of postmemory.” According to Hirsh: “Postmemory” describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to

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experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension. These events happened in the past, but their effects continue into the present. This is, I believe, the structure of postmemory and the process of its generation. 11

As part of this “postmemory” generation, Nita has no direct knowledge of the political violence that her parents escaped from after the military coup in 1954, nor is she aware of the devastation that followed, which Susanne Jonas refers to as “a tale of wholesale slaughter and acts of genocide.” 12 Her relationship with Guatemala is doubly fraught with conflict because her parents chose to shelter her from their past lives, including their first language. Her story is analogous to the literary works of “second-generation” postHolocaust writers since “the personal memory essential for identity formation through life narratives was absent. Absent memory nevertheless contains anxieties, neuroses, and other posttraumatic symptoms that compel the second generation to work through the unknown past.” 13 The ghostly absences and losses in Nita’s life prompt her to explore her parents’ hidden past, which in turn connects her to a larger historical memory. Merging the spectral with Hirsch’s idea that “[l]oss of family, home, of a sense of belonging and safety in the world ‘bleed’ from one generation to the next,” 14 I view Nita’s search for meaning as a way of embracing her Guatemalan-Americanness and connecting the living to the dead beyond geopolitical borders. 15 Barrientos’s Family Resemblance unearths Guatemala’s hidden secrets and opens the door to an unknown, haunted past for Nita. When her father, Diego de León, suffers a heart attack and loses the power to communicate, she turns to family friends and an attractive Cuban-American reporter to piece together her parent’s reasons for leaving Guatemala. After finding her mother’s old address book and a letter written in Spanish from an aunt she’s never heard of, Nita discovers that they fled when democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz was ousted, triggering what historian Greg Grandin refers to as “the first Latin American Cold War coup.” 16 Arbenz’s aspiration for land redistribution accentuated American fears of communism and threatened Guatemala’s largest landowner—the United Fruit Company. The decision to shield her from the divisive existence they left behind marks Nita so deeply that she becomes a therapist trained in exorcising the past. She is more comfortable, however, in her professional role as listener in her family coun-

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seling practice than excavating meaning from her parents’ silence. This vital connection between psychoanalysis and haunting is brought to light by Stephen Frosh’s assertion, “[p]sychoanalysis is telepathically, transferentially infected with all these specters and ghosts, attracting envious glances and overdetermined passions; and at the end it comes to face itself, tired perhaps, full of something it can never lay to rest.” 17 During her search for answers she finds that her father was a student activist and an ardent Arbenz supporter of working class background who was targeted for assassination, but was saved when his wife Regina used her elite family connections to get him out of the country. Even later after becoming US citizens, they maintained a life of secrecy, never knowing whom to trust. Equally distrustful, Nita struggles to establish a relationship with her Aunt Pancha and grandmother who travel to visit Diego in the hospital. Their visit further complicates Nita’s sense of self, since she does not speak Spanish and lacks an understanding of Guatemala’s political context. Pancha demands that Nita finally face the ghosts of the past: “You think you’re honoring your parents by living with a white picket fence and an empty page to call your past? . . . Ignoring their lives? Pretending your history started with you?” . . . “Juanita,” she says, “families are chains linked together by shared lives. That’s what makes them blood. What are you so afraid of knowing?” . . . “Sacrifices were made for you!” Pancha’s voice shakes with anger, “Risks were taken so you could live the way you do. Show some respect!” 18

Straining family matters even further, she learns that her father and his sister Pancha fought on opposite sides of the political spectrum, thus underscoring the deeply personal and political nature of a civil conflict that set the groundwork for what later escalated into a war that lasted thirty-six years, leaving 200,000 dead and sending thousands into exile. 19 Given her father’s reluctance to speak of the past when he was healthy and his inability to speak after the stroke, Nita uncovers that he was, in fact, a communist who denied his views to obtain US citizenship. Armed with this new knowledge, she faces her linguistic discomfort when she travels to Guatemala to lay his ashes to rest during Holy Week. This important act of traveling to Guatemala for the first time to give proper burial to her father in conjunction with gaining a more informed understanding of what he fought for finally begins to heal the wounds of absent memories and lost language ties.

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“POSTMEMORY” AND GRIEVABILITY IN SYLVIA SELLERSGARCÍA’S WHEN THE GROUND TURNS IN ITS SLEEP Like Nita de León, Nítido Amán searches for an intergenerational dialogue denied to him by his parents, so he travels to Guatemala in search of answers in When the Ground Turns in its Sleep. Raised in the United States, he also belongs to the “generation of postmemory” or what Ana Ros refers to as a “post-dictatorship generation.” 20 Having recently lost his father, also named Diego, to Alzheimer’s, Nítido is immersed in a deep sense of loss throughout the novel. He travels to the town of Río Roto after his father’s death at the end of August 1993, while the war is still ongoing (the Peace Accords were

Figure 3.2. Three women, survivors of the violence, watch as the remains of relatives and friends who were killed in the early 1980s are exhumed. Nebaj, Quiché, 2000. Photograph by Jonathan Moller.

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signed in 1996). His journey coincides with Hirsch’s delineation of a “narrative of return,” “in which children of survivors return to find their parents’ former homes, to ‘walk where they once walked.’” 21 His mother, who dies of a heart attack during his stay in Guatemala, fears for his safety since he was born there and looks Guatemalan but is clearly an outsider raised in the United States. When he arrives in this politically haunted space he is mistaken for the new priest yet does nothing to reveal his true identity. Instead, he silently adopts this new role to explore his personal ties to his birth country. He walks around town attempting to connect with people, but they are hesitant to speak to an outsider. Clearly traumatized by the war, their mistrust and secrecy are their only protection against orejas or informants that continue to wield power with impunity. Acting as the new priest, he plagiarizes sermons, hears confession, administers last rites, and is tricked into marrying a young couple without their parents’ permission. Nítido stays in the sacristy, which the community considers a haunted space because, previously, the guerrillas rounded up people, along with the priest, and hung them from the sacristy’s beams, cutting crosses on their stomachs, allowing “gravity do the rest.” 22 At mass, he conducts a ritualized reading of the names of more than two hundred dead, and cares for the cemetery, which is another haunted, politicized space. This “narrative of return” delves into the politicization of violence, depicting a town haunted by death, sickness, and silence where forced disappearance is an open wound that further confounds the mourning process. In Río Roto, Nítido reads the cryptic journals that hold his father’s vanished memories to reconnect with the place of their birth. Having left Guatemala as a young child with his parents, he grew up in Los Angeles and Oregon and read many books about Guatemala in college: “I spent half my waking time inhabiting that faraway place, even though, like everyone else I knew, I had no understanding of it.” 23 His textbook knowledge does not prepare him for the deep pain that haunts the inhabitants of Río Roto. His father’s ghost returns to him as he searches for clues about his past. With his dead father as interlocutor he reflects: Whatever fragmentary piece of the past you’d left in Guatemala lay buried, all but invisible and entirely inaccessible in the present. Guatemala had gone on without you—without us—while we were gone. And we had likewise gone on without it. I felt compelled to consider the possibility that the burdens of time did not move smoothly from hand to hand in cyclical progression; rather they crumbled, dispersed, and accumulated like layers of debris, amassing infinitely with terrible determination. 24

Unlike Nita, he pieces together this fragmented and layered past in Spanish as a heritage speaker but he nevertheless misses the subtleties that people try to communicate, failing “to grasp the meaning behind their words.” 25 His

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misunderstandings are rooted in a deeper sense of loss since his parents also purposefully hid or “disappeared” their life experiences from him. Theresa Delgadillo asserts, “Nítido recognizes the silence in Guatemala as a familiar one, even a familial one since his parents never spoke to him of Guatemala or of family in Guatemala. It was a place they had seemingly left utterly and completely behind. But this absence, rather than the familiarity with place, imprinted itself on Nítido.” 26 The fact that his history is erased from him is reflected in his name. First, his parents shed the name “Rodríguez” upon leaving Guatemala and kept only “Amán.” Second, he was born without a trace of blood on his body, not even on the umbilical cord. His uncanny birth is replicated in the fact that he is unsure of having real memories of his own: “I do have one memory of Guatemala from when I was younger, but I’m never certain whether it’s a memory of a dream that I confused with a memory or a recollection of some other time and place that I wrongly slipped into the first three years of my life. The more I think of it, the more tenuous it becomes.” 27 Rather than providing answers, Guatemala confounds his selfidentity due to his tormented relationship with writing. Before completing his college degree in creative writing and history, he was accused of plagiarism while suffering from vertigo and cryptomnesia. His readings became so intimately intermingled in his mind that he could not differentiate his own original ideas from what he gained second-hand. He confesses: I don’t know how it’s possible to distinguish one from the other. I don’t know what purpose it would even serve, when so many of the things we think about came from somewhere else. From this perspective, it’s impossible to avoid being a compilation of stolen words and ideas. . . . When I consider this, that ideas can be borrowed as much from people as from pages, I find it difficult to understand where to draw the line. 28

Given the larger context of disappearances during the counterinsurgent war, it seems that Nítido borrows or absorbs other people’s words and memories as his own to fill an inner, ghostly void. His parents’ buried experiences haunt him as a “seething presence,” leading him to assume another identity to reckon with that hidden past. 29 Orphaned like Nita de León, Nítido Aman’s search for his roots unearths a complex tale of cruelty among unmarked graves, shrouded pasts, and the need for reinvention. His visit to the haunted towns of Río Roto and Naranjo echo his deception: “The distant Naranjo could not expiate itself through close contact, and it came to represent, for Río Roto, all that was untrue.” 30 When he discovers a secret schoolhouse (a previous school was set on fire with people in it) where children are read the sacred Popol Vuh in Spanish and K’iche, a teacher reveals, “We don’t like to draw attention. Teaching is not as harmless as it is in other parts of the world.” 31 The clandestine schoolhouse reveals that the struggle against memory and language loss depends on a critical awareness of indigenous identity

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in the next generation. During this “narrative of return,” Nítido reconnects with this haunted landscape that disinters the bones of a hidden past out of a need for justice: “The ground seemed to disintegrate beneath me inch by inch, and I imagined that it wouldn’t be long before the bones would begin to show, gleaming white as the rain washed them clean.” 32 His return to Guatemala as part of the grieving “generation after” is reminiscent of the final words of Colin Davis’s Haunted Subjects: I can no longer be sure whether my words are my own or those of someone who has died or will die, I cannot tell whether I am visited by past or future ghosts or by my own imaginings. The appearance of ghosts in fiction and theory perhaps corresponds to our most persistent needs, fears and desires: the need to believe that something of us and of what we love will survive; the fear that the dead are all around us or, alternatively, that we have been deserted by them; and the desire to know that we are not alone, that we are free to follow our own path but that something nevertheless watches over and accompanies us. 33

UNEARTHING GUATEMALA’S HAUNTED PAST: EXCAVATING ABSENCE AND RECLAIMING HOME The spectrality of political violence in Barrientos’s Family Resemblance and Sellers-Garcia’s When the Ground Turns in its Sleep takes on the ghostly mission of reckoning with state-sponsored violence in order to lay to rest the ghosts of the dead. This is a deeply painful task that Guatemala has been waging for decades. María Luz García states that the entire diocese of El Quiché has been declared “sacred ground because the number of dead in clandestine graves is so overwhelming that it is impossible to exhume all the bodies for formal burial.” 34 Moreover, government soldiers “purposefully made the proper care of the dead impossible. They dumped the bodies of those they executed in unmarked common graves in the mountains; they stood over the bodies of victims and killed those who returned to bury them; they dismembered the dead or let dogs carry away the remains.” 35 This terror haunts the fictionalized protagonists and is given visual representation in Jonathan Moller’s photographic collection titled Our Culture is Our Resistance: Repression, Refuge, and Healing in Guatemala (2004). The blackand-white images expose the personal and collective impact of the civil conflict with firsthand testimonies that cry out for justice and a final resting place for their loved ones. One survivor states, “When the army entered the communities, they killed everyone they found—men, women, and children—and they burned the houses. Later they went to look for those of us who were fleeing into the mountains. Many of our brothers have never returned because they were killed. We left behind those whom we were able to

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Figure 3.3. Relatives and supporters carry the remains of 120 people who were massacred in the 1980s through the principal streets of Nebaj, Quiché, 2001. Photograph by Jonathan Moller.

bury. They have remained there, refugees even in death. For us, it is as if they are still in exile, and we want to bring them home.” 36 Echoing Rosita’s final words, Moller’s photographs of exhumations in clandestine cemeteries represent a way of honoring the dead, giving them dignity, and exposing statesponsored violence. Don Manuel, for example, expresses the anguish of surviving and a desperate need for healing: Before the exhumation, I carried a heavy load that wouldn’t leave me in peace. . . . When they began to dig, I remembered the whole history of violence when I saw the clothes and bones. . . . Then I began to see the exhumation as a reunion with my family. . . . I can exhume them and take them into

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Moller affirms the power of these testimonies: “These are stories of life and death, of hope and despair, and of struggles for survival. These stories and images can no longer be hidden behind walls of fear, denial, and impunity.” 38 The images and voices captured in collections such as Our Culture is Our Resistance break the silence that haunts Guatemalans as well as those living abroad. As the novels attest, it is unlikely that Guatemalan-Americans could truly feel at home in the country they care deeply about if it buries the truth in silence as their parents did. Still grieving, they engage in a personal excavation and exhumation process that nevertheless is an act of “place making” that deals with “the remains of the past” and the “search for historical clarification.” 39 The work of the next generation is emphasized by Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchú Tum: “Each moment recorded by Jonathan Moller’s camera passes into eternity, yet also gives encouragement for the future. Each moment sets an example for future generations, so that they may know the past, which is filled with darkness but also contains hope, struggle, and optimism.” 40 Like these haunting images, Barrientos’s and Sellers-García’s novels provide an important space for considering both the wounds left by political violence and the desire to connect more deeply to a homeland in search of justice. 41 Like the silence of absent memories, the wounds left by language-loss of a post-exilic or postmemory generation connect Nita de León and Nítido Amán to the larger communities of English dominant Latinas/os or heritage Spanish speakers born in the United States. Emotionally marked by Guatemala’s haunted past, these Guatemalan-American protagonists widen the often limited scope of US Latina/o Studies. 42 As children of immigrants, they carry the weight of their parents’ exile in search of a better life in El Norte, while longing for a deeper connection to their Latin American roots. By reflecting on their privilege and language identity, they draw attention to Guatemala’s “quiet genocide”—simultaneously creating awareness of a painful chapter of Latin American history while contributing to a more diverse representation of Latinos/as in the United States. By reckoning with the violence of the past, these works of fiction draw attention to a uniquely Central American experience often overshadowed in US Latina/o studies. Arturo Arias notes the contradiction between the overwhelming presence of Central Americans in the United States (a result of the wars during the 1980s as depicted in El Norte) and their invisibility within the multicultural landscape. He cautions against the risk of “homogenizing what is, in reality, a very heterogeneous community.” 43

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By breaking the silence their parents maintained under the shadow of death, Nita and Nítido’s personal stories of families torn apart by war become part of the larger narrative of a country still recovering from conflict. Going in search of their parents’ missing past, they mourn many other deaths. Their deeply personal stories shed light on a larger political dialogue that points to an intentionally hidden past, inviting readers on both sides of the North/South divide to examine how ghosts make themselves present out of a demand for justice. The novels summon readers to wrestle with the spectral undertaking to disentomb past abuses. Through them we witness the “seething presence” of ghosts that desperately want to make themselves known. As younger generations become further removed from the terror of the past, the responsibility to create awareness becomes even greater. Hopefully, as younger members of the “postmemory generation” reconnect to their roots, history can continue to be uncovered, unsilenced and undisappeared ever so slowly so that justice is finally served and the ghosts of the past can rest. NOTES 1. Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, El Norte, directed by Gregory Nava (Chiapas, Mexico, and Los Angeles: American Playhouse, PBS, 1983). 2. Nava and Thomas, El Norte. 3. Tanya Maria Barrientos, Family Resemblance (New York: Penguin, 2003); Sylvia Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns in its Sleep (New York: Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2007). 4. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, “Introduction: Conceptualizing Spectralities,” in The Spectralities Reader, ed. Blanco and Peeren (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 19. 5. Colin Davis, “Charlotte Delbo’s Ghosts,” French Studies 59, no. 1 (2005): 9. 6. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 8. 7. Barrientos, Family Resemblance, 16. 8. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York: Columbia, 2012), 61. 9. Barrientos, Family Resemblance, 7. 10. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 63. 11. Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory, 5. 12. Susanne Jonas, “Guatemala: Acts of Genocide and Scorched-earth Counterinsurgency War,” in Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons, 4th ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 355. 13. Efraim Sicher, “Postmemory, Backshadowing, Separation: Teaching Second-Generation Holocaust Fiction,” in Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004), 263. 14. Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory, 34. 15. Arturo Arias coined the term “Central American-American” in his article “Central America-Americans: Invisibility, Power, and Representation,” Latino Studies 1, no. 1 (March 2003): 168–87. 16. Greg Grandin, “Politics by Other Means: Guatemala’s Quiet Genocide,” in Quiet Genocide: Guatemala 1981–1983, ed. Etelle Higonnet (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 339.

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17. Stephen Frosh, “Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmission,” American Imago 69, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 263. 18. Barrientos, Family Resemblance, 197. 19. The estimated number of refugees and internally displaced falls between 500,000 to 1.5 million, and another 150,000 who fled, mostly to Mexico (Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico, Guatemala, memoria del silencio [Guatemala: Oficina de Servicios para Proyectos de las Naciones Unidas, 1999], http://www.centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/descargas/ guatemala-memoria-silencio/guatemala-memoria-del-silencio.pdf [accessed July 28, 2015]). 20. Ana Ros, The Post-Dictatorship Generation in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay: Collective Memory and Cultural Production (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 21. Hirsch, Generation of Postmemory, 205. 22. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 176. 23. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 43. 24. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 142. 25. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 62. 26. Theresa Delgadillo, “The Criticality of Latino/a Fiction in the Twenty-First Century,” American Literary History 23, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 605. 27. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 254. 28. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 218. 29. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 195. 30. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 135. 31. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 188. 32. Sellers-García, When the Ground Turns, 273. 33. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 159. 34. María Luz García, “The Long Count of Historical Memory: Ixhil Maya Ceremonial Speech in Guatemala,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 4 (November 2014): 664. 35. García, “The Long Count of Historical Memory,” 664. 36. . Jonathan Moller, Our Culture is Our Resistance: Repression, Refuge, and Healing in Guatemala, 8. 37. Moller, Our Culture is Our Resistance, 174. 38. Moller, Our Culture is Our Resistance, 12. 39. Erica Henderson, Catherine Nolin, and Fredy Peccerelli, “Dignifying a Bare Life and Making Place through Exhumation: Cobán CREOMPAZ Former Military Garrison, Guatemala,” Journal of Latin American Geography 13, no. 2 (2014): 97–116, https://muse.jhu.edu/ (accessed July 28, 2015). 40. Rigoberta Menchú quoted in Moller, Our Culture is Our Resistance, 7. 41. The conviction of retired general Efraín Ríos Montt for crimes against humanity and genocide is historic, but impunity and corruption continue to prevail. 42. In an article titled “Retratos autobiográficos y emociones literarias” in the Spanish newspaper El País (November 19, 2011), Sylvia Sellers-García comments on her dual identity: “Cuando estoy en Guatemala todos me identifican como gringa; cuando estoy en EE UU me vuelvo híbrida. Ser mitad gringa (por parte de padre) y mitad guatemalteca (por parte de madre) me recuerda continuamente lo que significa ser del margen y del centro: la satisfacción de ser tan visible; el pavoneo disminuido de ser siempre—pero invisiblemente—de la periferia. Intento escribir respetando la complejidad política de esta dualidad, y me inspiro en escrituras en inglés y de autores en cierta forma desplazados: Ishiguro inventando Japón; Sebald recordando Alemania. He llegado no sólo a aceptar la dualidad, sino a buscarla: soy mitad escritora de ficción, mitad historiadora. Ver cada mitad por fuera es una primera comprensión” [When I am in Guatemala, everyone identifies me as gringa; when I am in the United States I become hybrid. Being half gringa (on my father’s side) and half Guatemalan (on my mother’s side) continuously reminds me what it means to be from the margin and the center: the satisfaction of being so visible; the subtle swagger of always being–however invisibly—from the perifery. I try write respectign the complexity of the politics of this duality, and I am inspired by writing in English and by authors who are removed in some way: Ishiguro invents Japan; Sebald remembers Germany. I have come to not only accept the duality but also to look for it: I am half

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fiction writer and half historian. Seeing everything from the outside is a first pass at comprehension]. http://elpais.com/diario/2011/11/19/babelia/1321665138_850215.html (accessed on November 14, 2014). 43. Arias, “Central American-Americans,” 190.

II

The Persistence of Violence: Trauma as Haunting

The notion of open present, or acontemporaneity of the present to itself, implied in historiographical approaches to spectral criticism invites reflection about the traces of violent or otherwise traumatic episodes as haunting, and the impact of such haunting in the individual psyche as well as in subjective discourse production. Etymologically, “haunt” refers to a place visited frequently. From this definition sprung later the supernatural connotations of the term. Similarly, in one of his more celebrated yet baffling and unsystematic texts, The Uncanny (1919), Freud contends that repetition is one of the constitutive characteristics of the unheimlich, or uncanny. It is not just about the encounter with the alien or strange in a familiar context: this unheimlich must imply the repetition or duplication of an experience or object. Freud’s unheimlich is the moment in which the consciousness of the modern subject experiences a temporary return of “savage” thought, 1 or, to express it in more neutral terms, magical thought, or causal connection between natural phenomena and transcendent experience. Under Freud’s influence, narrative theory has tended to represent the unheimlich as repetition, duplication, or return. From this perspective, trauma involves an experience of the uncanny insofar as it entails an unexpected, painful encounter of a rupture with what the psyche conceives of as normal or foreseeable experience. It also entails the symptomatic, later return of this rupture. A popular view of trauma in narrative theory is the one articulated by Cathy Caruth, 2 who understands trauma as a re-exposition and re-experiencing of an event not fully registered by the consciousness in its first occurrence. Here, trauma necessarily entails a

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return. Despite the relative lack of clinical evidence to support this perspective, it brings to the fore the role of narrative in connection to trauma. On the one hand, producing or receiving a narrative seeking to reestablish values of truth may have a therapeutic effect on a victim. On the other hand, the reproduction of an extremely painful event into a hierarchical structure of sense may trigger re-experiencing the trauma. The common association of trauma to mind and behavioral sciences invites us to think of it as an individual experience, even though there have been approaches considering it a collective one. Dominick LaCapra 3 identifies foundational trauma as a form of haunting in processes of collective identity formation. This foundational trauma is an event, real or imagined, that configures the basis of the discursive formation of the identity of a specific group. In its more melancholic dimension, foundational trauma may involve an attachment to loss or to past injury that can have a limiting effect in the collective’s members’ development in the present. The concept of foundational trauma is important to Transhispanic studies, which examines five centuries of biological and cultural genocide in the Americas, the enslavement and exclusion of populations of African descent, religious persecutions, modern and contemporary political traumas resulting from civil wars, oppressive regimes, torture, forcible disappearances, and exile, and the ongoing devastation caused by the operations of global capital in an era in which neoliberalism reigns unabated. Trauma affects not only the direct victims, but also their descendants, who find themselves haunted in an affective epistemological process of conflictive and incomplete recovery of the past that Marianne Hirsch conceptualizes as “postmemory.” 4 Postmemory hinges between trauma as personal experience and the historical and sometimes mythical character of foundational trauma, while dealing with narrative and graphic exposure to the reality of violence against immediate ascendants in the family tree, and their outcomes, be they retraumatizing or working through processes. Again, this is especially relevant to Transhispanic studies with the coming of age of generations born and raised—often in a context of geographical displacement—after episodes of violence against groups deemed subversive. There is, clearly, a thematic overlap between studies focusing on haunting as a historical experience, especially when following violent episodes and authoritarian regimes, and studies dealing with the representation of trauma’s aftereffects. In this section, we have selected studies that focus on the psychological, internal, individual experiences of trauma and its aftereffects, rather than the wider political and cultural approach dominating the studies in the previous section. In keeping with the spirit of this compilation, we have also sought to avoid vague discussions of the traumas following war, dictatorship, and repression as haunting, which would constitute a mere resort to derivative

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metaphor as a definition. Rather, this section includes studies addressing explicitly the connection between trauma and the spectral, be it in its more common, anthropomorphic manifestation (the ghost) or in other alternative shapes. Karen Wooley Martin explores the immateriality of the vanished, the persistent haunting of two restless spirits that return, uninvoked, to two women struggling to come to terms with their families’ involvement with the Junta in the novels Perla (2012), by Carolina De Robertis, an American of Uruguayan descent, and Purgatorio (2008), the last novel by Tomás Eloy Martínez, self-exiled from Argentina for nearly half of his life. 5 The spatial and generational distance from the traumatic event contrasts starkly with the claims to immediacy of the nonfictional testimonio. Charles St-Georges addresses the relationship of the second generation in a chapter about a lesserknown, straight-to-DVD film, by Paco Cabezas (2007). 6 St-Georges analyzes Aparecidos essentially as a political drama employing topoi from horror cinema. The film not only consists of the literalization of encounters with the “ghosts of the past” but also of a national allegory representing the retraumatization implied in second-generation recognition of the horrors of the immediate past and the impossibility to render proportional justice to its victims. In her chapter, Sarah Thomas contends that the ubiquity of the ghostly child in contemporary Spanish cinema evidences its privileged and problematic place in the modern imaginary for a nation that has engaged in much dialogue about how to articulate historical memory. Her study of El espinazo del diablo (2001) and El orfanato (2007) connects child revenants to themes of fratricidal violence, mass graves, child abduction, and the repeated, retraumatizing cycle of loss provoked by the unresponsive attitude of political powers that to this day continues to plague Spanish social and cultural life, and politics. 7 The editors recognize that the spectral dimension of trauma is not limited to anthropomorphic forms, as in the geographical aspect of recent Colombian literature and film analyzed in Juliana Martínez’s “Fog Instead of Land: Spectral Topographies of Disappearance in Colombia’s Recent Literature and Film.” From the standpoint of horror as affect, Martínez critiques the exploitative aspects of the pornomiseria genre made popular in Colombia in the 1990s, and analyzes more recent narratives by Evelio Rosero, Jaime Osorio, and William Vega to explore representational techniques that refuse to echo voyeuristic, mimetic discourses that reenact conflict and violence. Instead, their works focus on literal and symbolic disappearances in the topology of Colombia. Martínez calls this departure from the ontotopology of presence “spectral spatiality.” Like Colombia itself, these narratives need to be understood as spaces haunted by the very uncertainty and unrest that violence (re)produces. Therefore, they advance and embody a spectral spa-

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tiality that encourages novel ways of thinking about Colombia’s recent history. NOTES 1. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. Adam Phillips, trans. David McClintock (New York: Penguin, 2003), 149. 2. Cathy Caruth, ed., Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 3. Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004). 4. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1997). 5. Carolina De Robertis, Perla (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Tomás Eloy Martínez, Purgatorio (México, DF: Alfaguara, 2008). 6. Paco Cabezas, Aparecidos (The Appeared), directed by Paco Cabezas, DVD (2007; Buenos Aires: SBP Worldwide, 2010). 7. Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, and David Muñoz, El espinazo del Diablo, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Spain; Mexico: Warner Sogefilms AIE; US: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001; Columbia TriStar Entertainment, 2004); Sergio G. Sánchez, El orfanato, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (Llanes, Oviedo, Asturias, and Barcelona, Spain: New Line Home Video, 2007).

Chapter Four

Apparitions and Absence Spectrality in Contemporary Novels of the Disappeared Karen Wooley Martin

Sandra Lorenzano’s significant study of Argentinean trauma literature in the aftermath of the 1976–1983 military dictatorship frames the nation as “un conjunto de ‘muertos vivientes’ en tregua permanente” 1 [a band of living dead in a permanent ceasefire]. The sense of haunting by restless spirits permeates two recent Southern Cone–anchored novels, Carolina De Robertis’s Perla (2012) and Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatorio (2008). 2 Both novels begin twenty years after the dictatorship, with the apparition of longvanished beings to female protagonists who are struggling to come to terms with their fathers’ roles in Argentina’s military dictatorship. While Purgatorio’s Emilia Dupuy is a sixty-year-old who has devoted three decades to the relentless pursuit of her vanished husband, the ghost who haunts college student Perla Correa appears without having been summoned on the conscious level, as an aqueous, undead creature, who bears the physical and psychic scars of the disappeared. Perla finds herself strangely drawn to this being as it appropriates her parents’ home, drop by drop, until it has irreversibly imprinted the truth upon General Correa’s private domain. Purgatorio presents multiple layers of haunting and erasure as the consequences of the dictatorship’s paradoxical campaign of public patriotism coupled with notquite-hidden brutality. After a wrenching multinational quest—covertly orchestrated by her sadistic father—Emilia Dupuy stumbles upon her disappeared husband, Simón, in a New Jersey restaurant, physically unchanged from the 1976 date of his disappearance. Read together, these novels map a genealogy of loss, trauma, and fragmentation as the consequences of buried familial and national discourses that refuse to remain suppressed. This chapter explores the haunting, palimpsestic nature of disappearance’s impact on 67

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those who are left behind, both the first generation that lived the trauma and the postmemory generation that has inherited it. Martínez has characterized the history of Argentina as “a history of necrophilia,” tracing the nation’s essence to a centuries-long attempt at reconciling its relentless attraction toward death and destruction. 3 The history of the military dictatorship haunts both his generation, many members of which were forced to flee the country as adults, and the two subsequent generations that have either grown up surrounded by walking ghosts in their home countries, or been reared outside the Southern Cone, as was De Robertis. In both novels, the female protagonist’s emergence into adulthood stalls as a result of this haunting. As Martínez observed, “Argentineans pursue the remains of what was, or what promised to be, so as not to be awakened to what they are and what they have.” 4 As my analysis of these novels attempts to demonstrate, both Emilia and Perla have been forced into a truncated state of being provoked by the disappeared person’s preservation somewhere outside time. As such, they are never fully in the past because of the uncertainty of his or her death and, likewise, they are denied a future. They hover somehow in an imagined present tense as survivors continue to construct an imagined life for those whose continued existence cannot be confirmed or denied. The pursuit of the specters manifests itself as a means of excavating the truth in Perla and as an attempt at resisting its full revelation in Purgatorio, ultimately leading to reconciliation in the former work and the embracing of fantasy in the latter. Both novels localize the experience of cultural haunting within the lived experiences of one woman with a shared point of departure, that of the haunted society described by Avery F. Gordon as follows: I used the term haunting to describe those singular and yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind-field comes into view. Haunting raises specters and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present and future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view. 5

That the works coincide in their demolition of the boundaries between death and life meshes with the absurd logic of the military dictatorship’s rhetoric, which blurred the margins between life and death as it plunged its victims into a nebulous state somewhere between existence and erasure. As cited in Perla’s epigraph, General Jorge Rafael Videla defined “[t]he aim of the Process”—the military dictatorship’s killing or disappearing of an estimated thirty thousand people—as “the profound transformation of consciousness.” 6 Gordon chillingly describes these thirty thousand as follows: “All of them tortured, most of them killed, their bodies burned, thrown into the sea, into the River Plate, or into the jungles of Tucumán by the air force

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and navy; or buried by the army in Non nombre (identity unknown) graves.” 7 The taking of these prisoners has been described as a “public secret,” “implemented to make sure others knew what was happening,” as a tactic for sustaining a state of terror that guaranteed their silence. 8 Locked into this carefully constructed national paralysis was a society of “sleepwalkers . . . their own and others’ policemen” trained by whispered accounts of torture and increasing evidence of disappearance to mute their consciousness and turn their eyes and ears from the shadows. 9 Martínez, who fled Argentina after the government publicly burned his book, La pasión según Trelew, 10 which was written pre-dictatorship but presciently depicted the killing of so-called subversives in prison, described the Argentina of the Process as “el momento donde lo irreal se vuelve lo normal. Es ahí, cuando la gente cree pisar tierra firme cuando en realidad está pisando un pantano” 11 [the moment when the unreal becomes normal. It is that point at which people think they’re stepping on solid ground, but in reality are stepping through the marsh], testing the limits between “realidad e irrealidad” 12 [reality and unreality]. Videla himself incongruently defined the disappeared as “alguien que no tiene entidad, que no está” 13 [someone who has no entity, who is not]. These specters continue to be rendered visible and public through the work of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the 2013 death flights trials in Buenos Aires, testimonial literature, and fictional and theatrical renderings that together support Lorenzano’s contention that in Argentina, “los fantasmas reaparecen constantemente” 14 [ghosts constantly reappear]. Uruguayan-American author De Robertis’s novels The Invisible Mountain (2009) 15 and Perla (2012) offer a panorama of the invisible—the imagined, unseen, or erased—history of the Southern Cone. Her first novel presents a multigenerational, ginocentric narrative of twentieth-century Uruguay that moves from European immigration and mestizaje to military dictatorship as it makes visible the history of a nation that is enigmatic, at best, for much of its US readership. The youngest of the three main characters, Salomé, becomes a Tupamaro fighter, a member of the National Liberation Movement, and is imprisoned and tortured for many years as an alleged terrorist. Salomé is spared death by the nation’s return to democracy, but the novel poignantly explores her complex process of re-integration into her family, and into a nation she no longer recognizes. Perla’s story chronologically overlaps the final narrative of The Invisible Mountain, but centers on guerra sucia’s impact on the next generation. Perla Correa has tried since childhood to camouflage her father’s military career—in effect, to disappear it—in order to successfully navigate adolescence in post-dictatorship Argentina during the 1990s. However, as a college student in 2001, she finds herself suddenly and relentlessly haunted by a spectral figure, a desaparecido who refuses to disappear.

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Significantly, Perla opens with a dual—perhaps dueling—epigraph. In contrast to the Videla quote discussed above, the second epigraph, taken from Moby Dick, reads: Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps. . . . He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. 16

The link between these epigraphs begins to emerge almost immediately, as the novel opens with Perla’s late-night discovery of a “human sponge” on the living room rug, a nameless, naked creature covered in seaweed who seeps water from the River Plate into the foundations of the house and whose appearance marks, in Perla’s words, “the moment . . . when my real life began,” as she begins to transcend the limits of consciousness. 17 The narrative, addressed in first-person from Perla to a “you” whose identity will not be revealed until the final chapter, establishes compressed time and suspended rationality as preconditions for entering into the tale: “Some things are impossible for the mind to hold alone. So listen, if you can, with your whole being. The story pushes and demands to be told, here, now, with you so close and the past even closer, breathing at the napes of our necks.” 18 Perla confesses that “unpalatable visions had not let me sleep” for the ten days between her breakup with Gabriel—an investigative journalist whose work focuses on pursuing justice for the disappeared—and the appearance of this stranger. 19 Her sleep-deprived state allows for the possibility that the man is a nightmare or perhaps an insomniac’s hallucination, yet she is hardly surprised to discover that he is still present the following morning. The reader glides, with Perla, away from the laws of rationality toward a condition that she begins to accept as insanity; yet, her training as a psychology major suggests to her that this man may be a manifestation of her subconscious. When she returns to class, the narrative point of view shifts to that of the entity on the floor, who begins to recall black boots, violence, and the image of his bound and blindfolded wife. Perla’s resistance to her emerging understanding of the man’s identity battles his insistence upon remaining present and visible. As the narrator notes, “after so much absence he must defend his presence,” even as he and Perla admit to each other that neither of them really believes he is alive. 20 Perla’s experiences with this haunting figure seem to embody the trauma paradigm postulated by Cathy Caruth, in which “[T]raumatic dreams are not autobiographically or subjectively mediated or owned by the individual; rather the ‘self’ . . . is possessed by the traumatic dream, which then bypasses all representation by impersonally memorializing and chronicling the historical

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truth of the traumatic origin.” 21 Caruth’s approach has been rightly criticized for presuming a homogeneous form of traumatic experience, and is particularly polemical for its assignment of effects of trauma to both the victim and the perpetrator. However, its applicability to Perla gains some support from De Robertis’s statement that: telling the story through Perla, a military man’s daughter, allowed me to do something else that I hadn’t seen elsewhere, and that seemed urgent to me: to attempt to portray the full humanity of perpetrators of these crimes, without excusing them. Who would more honestly grapple with that difficult humanity than a perpetrator’s beloved daughter? 22

While her connection to the ghostly man is not clarified until the final chapters of the novel, both Perla and the reader understand that reason cannot account for the ghost’s presence in her home nor for her uncanny ability to convey his and his wife’s experiences, which reach their endpoint in Perla’s birth. Her repeated references to the subconscious, to insomnia, and to Borges ease the reader/interlocutor into an oneiric borderlands that privileges inexplicable ways of knowing and unresolvable contradictions as a path to truth. In this context Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart’s reflections on trauma are particularly relevant: “[T]his failure to arrange the memory in words and symbols [such as the erasure of persons and their history by the Process] leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory . . . level, as somatic sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares and flashbacks.” 23 We learn that Perla has experienced trauma personally, in the conditions of her birth, the erasure of her origins, and the stigma of being the child of a perpetrator. As a child she was driven to crisis by her best friend’s angry question, “Are you a murderer too?” when the truth of the military’s crimes against humanity began to surface. 24 Gazing at her handsome father in his “proud clean uniform,” and his “face full of love” for her, Perla experiences her first sense of dislocation and fracturing as she simultaneously reels from the impossibility of reconciling her father with the image of torture, and concludes that she is “guilty by inheritance” of crimes she is too young to fully understand. 25 Guilt becomes physically inscribed upon her, as the crimes of my father—the crimes of the nation, also, crimes to which I had not given words—settled on me, rode my back, draped my shoulders, stuck to me and refused to wipe away. They were not delusions. I could no longer believe they were delusions. Things had happened in this nation, they were true. 26

Televised interviews with the torturers Adolfo Scilingo—a Correa family friend—and the unrepentant El Turco render the ghosts of Argentina increasingly visible. In a foreshadowing of the ghost’s arrival, death penetrates

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Perla’s home when her devastated mother closes herself off in the bedroom after watching the interviews, leaving “the corpses of neglected geraniums” which “turned to dark mobs of putrefaction” whose stench of decay is so strong “your mouth could taste the decay, your skin crawled with the sensation of a hundred crumbled flowers.” 27 Despite the overt presence of death in the home, however, Perla alone acknowledges it, while “[her] parents lived God knows where, in some other house that occupied the same physical space but adhered to different rules of reality, impossible to penetrate.” For the protagonist, the flowers are further evidence that “The Hidden loomed among us, impossible to shrug off or deny,” 28 despite others’ refusal to see them. The origins of Perla’s ghost become clearer after Perla recalls Scilingo’s appearance on the news program Hora Clave, during which he admitted to having participated in two death flights that killed thirty people. 29 The chapter placed subsequent to this event in the narration, presents the ghost’s recollection of his own plunge from an airplane as part of a “swirling human cumulus” “swallowed by the sea.” 30 As the ghost recovers the memory of his own horrific fate, Perla’s identity becomes clear to him for the first time, and he understands why he was compelled to return to this particular house. De Robertis has identified these death flights as Perla’s genesis, and here the links between trauma and spectrality become clear. As she noted in response to an interviewer’s question about the presence of the ghost, while researching Uruguay’s history for The Invisible Mountain: I came across the death flights in neighboring Argentina, in which disappeared people were stripped naked and thrown alive from airplanes into the sea. I became obsessed by these bodies lost into the water, and then with the idea of one of them rising up to visit the living. . . . [I]t allowed me to do something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the literature or filmography of the disappeared, which is to give the disappeared a voice of their own, to explore their side of the story in an immediate way. 31

Kathleen Brogan’s work on spectrality is particularly helpful in reading narratives of the disappeared. As she notes, “in contemporary haunted literature, ghost stories are offered as an alternative—or challenge—to ‘official,’ dominant history.” 32 Consequently, the ghost represents a “double-sided figuration of powerlessness and power.” 33 Given the persistence of schema such as the “theory of the two demons,” which contextualizes the dirty war in terms of “a supposed symmetry between the violence of the guerrillas and that of the state,” rendering the disappeared present and fully voiced is particularly necessary and powerful as a counter-narrative. 34 As Brogan observes, “as an absence made present, the ghost can give expression to [the invisible].” 35 In the context of Argentina’s military dictatorship, literary hauntings echo the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared’s tradition of protests

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in the Plaza de Mayo with photographs that preserve their loved ones’ public presence. Perhaps one of the most poignant examples of this is an early “siluetazo” [Silhouette Protest] of March 21, 1983, described by Lorenzano as “una movilización en la que la mayor parte de los manifestantes no estaba allí” 36 [a protest in which the majority of the protesters were not there]. Protesters sketched and cut out life-sized silhouettes to represent their missing loved ones, and thousands joined the protest in what Roberto Amigo Cerisola has described as an occupation of the plaza by the silhouettes of the disappeared. 37 As Lorenzano points out, this doubling, in which each protester carries the image of another, creates the powerful visual image that the disappeared are protesting on their own behalf. In the second half of the novel, as the ghost begins to recover his identity, Perla’s home slowly cedes to his presence, which has now seeped into the floor. Realizing that her parents’ home has flooded briefly jolts her back to the physical world. As she searches for a way to explain her “guest’s” presence, Perla imagines the following speech she might make to her parents: a phantom . . . , or rather, one of the disappeared who reappeared. Yes, I know, who could have imagined it—but then again, isn’t there some logic to the reappearance of what disappears? . . . If you can’t explain how something went away, then why should its return obey the laws of reason? And what is reason anyway, hasn’t it been used to exploit the—yes, yes, I’m sorry, let’s not fight, we were talking about the rug. Your rug. I’m afraid it’s gone. You might say it’s disappeared. 38

Concluding once again that reason is not particularly relevant to her situation, Perla realizes, “The pragmatic part of my mind had come undone. . . . I could not address the future when I had barely begun to address the crowded past.” 39 As she sits quietly with the ghost, he remembers more and more of his life—and Perla’s origins—and oozes more and more liquid until his presence has fully overtaken the space. Literally, there is “no corner dry enough in this house” for her to continue hiding. 40 The water image signaled in the epigraph assumes increasing power in this second half of the narrative, as it grows to encompass both this man’s disappearance and apparition, and the fluidity of time and consciousness. As she begins to retreat more deeply into the past with the ghost—an act that, paradoxically, restores her future to her—Perla concludes that, “Time, it turned out, was not a river at all but an ocean, spreading in all directions, disorderly and vast, swirling with spiraled currents. You never knew where you might drift, or what would become of you along the way.” 41 At the same time, the specter reveals that “consciousness—death showed him this—is a supple wide translucent thing that can gather and disperse, stretch and shrink.” 42 He describes a “sloshing permeability of consciousness” forged of memories and bodies in the sea that form an unseen “third city, the liquid

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city, that hung underwater . . . , challenging the arrogance of steel and stone” of its two bordering cities—Montevideo and Buenos Aires—that are continuously haunted by this amorphous creature formed by their erased past. 43 In this framework, the disappeared echo Moby Dick’s depiction of those who have drowned yet return, filled with knowledge that is more easily dismissed as lunacy than accepted within the limits of rational consciousness. The voice of protest and Perla’s sensitivity to it may be read in terms of “working through” trauma, the term frequently employed by Caruth and other trauma studies scholars. As Dominick LaCapra points out, “Traumatic memory . . . may involve belated temporality and a period of latency between a real or fantasized early event and a later one that somehow recalls it and triggers renewed repression, dissociation, or foreclosure and intrusive behavior.” 44 In this case, as Perla ultimately reveals, her precipitating crisis was Gabriel’s suggestion that she might be the daughter of a disappeared woman. By yielding to repressed possibilities, she slowly retrieves the truth about her identity, through a symbiotic flow of consciousness that also sets the ghost at peace, freeing him to rest beside his wife’s body. Within a trauma studies perspective, Perla’s experience of recovering latent truths by transgressing spatio-temporal borders is not implausible. As LaCapra points out, “[W]hen the past is uncontrollably relived, it is as if there were no difference between it and the present. Whether or not the past is reenacted or repeated in its precise literality . . . one experientially feels as if one were back there reliving the event, and distance between here and there, then and now collapses.” 45 After reliving her biological parents’ trauma, Perla is symbolically reborn by plunging herself into the pool of memories where the ghost had lain, so that “in a sudden act of alchemy, she became herself.” 46 As she emerges, she flings water from the pool of memories at the walls, at her parents’ wedding photo, at the furniture, the kitchen, and even the sacrosanct space of her father’s study, realizing, “I wanted the whole house to . . . sway under these waters,” the waters of truth. 47 Thus, the unfinished business of the desaparecido is completed by Perla, who forces these submerged memories into the conscious realm by permanently inscribing evidence of them into the general’s private domain. Reckoning with her own embodiment of this inheritance as both the child of the disappeared and the product of a privileged upbringing by someone who must have been complicit in those horrific acts of disappearance and murder, Perla flees home and eventually reaches the office of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, where she begins the process of empirically verifying what the phantom has already revealed to her. In a scene that skillfully links personal and national histories, Perla walks Buenos Aires for nine hours, an “exile,” who is uncertain whether she is returning home or “newly cast adrift.” 48 The Plaza de Mayo is particularly meaningful to her on that day, as she envisions history from the Plaza’s perspective: heads

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mounted on stakes as warnings against subversion in the nineteenth-century; Evita speaking to the crowds from the Casa Rosada; and the mothers and grandmothers who have marched in the plaza for decades to ensure that their loved ones are remembered. In that site of centuries of the layering of both pain and joy, Perla wonders if “we believe the past is . . . still a phantom hiding in the winds of the current moment.” 49 The novel’s brief final chapter, “You,” reveals that Perla’s interlocutor is her soon-to-be-born daughter, who embodies this phantom past in a dual legacy of loss and love. Speaking to the child while she is in the early stages of labor, Perla remembers learning that baby girls have all their eggs already formed in miniature while they are in the womb. So that the egg of you was in me before I was born. So that when I was in my mother, whose face I never saw, a fleck of you was there, a fleck inside a girl inside a woman. Which means that when she disappeared we both disappeared with her, and every reappearance—yours, mine, into the future— belongs to all of us as well. . . . [H]aving carried you, I see the depth of what was lost. Carrying you has brought new floods of grief. But it has also helped me see the depth of what cannot be lost, the unbreakable threads, invisible to the mind, indelible to the body. 50

Perla’s baby will be named Gloria in tribute to the grandmother whose life was taken, yet endures within both Perla and Gloria’s new grandchild, who will be born on the anniversary of the ghost’s appearance in Perla’s home. As embodied in Perla, Argentina’s collective and individual futures will forever be marked by a legacy of violence and loss, as centuries of ghosts are carried into the future in the DNA and the collective unconscious. Perla’s military family, incapable of facing the phantoms in their home, remains stagnant, impassive, and “blinded” by “what [was] lost,” 51 yet those characters who force themselves to acknowledge the past and work through its legacy of pain are able to move as Perla does, “from the underground into the light” of truth and reconciliation. 52 Similiar to De Robertis, Martínez rejects the constraints of linear time and quantifiable knowledge as inadequate for containing the experiences of haunted protagonists who inhabit a sphere beyond the bounds of chronology and logic. While the circumstances of Perla’s birth marked her as both the child of disappearance and the stolen child of the regime, anchoring her in what Eva Hoffman identifies as trauma’s “hinge generation,” Emilia’s adulthood was stolen by her husband’s disappearance, placing her fully in the first generation of the dictatorship’s survivors. 53 However, these novels portray a similar pattern of stagnation and isolation for both generations, the younger Argentine who receives memories as a cultural product and the older one who lived through—and continues to live in—horror, serving as testament to Martínez’s view of his country as a nation in love with their dead or disappeared. Purgatorio is Tomás Eloy Martínez’s final novel, published two

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years before his death from cancer in 2010. A 2005 finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, he lived in New Jersey for most of the final two decades of his life, becoming a Spanish professor and Director of Latin American Studies at Rutgers University in 1995, and later writer-in-residence and professor emeritus. Rutgers and the New Jersey setting figure prominently in his works, which play with the boundaries of genre and the limits between fiction and reality. Purgatorio continues this tendency: for example, an author who may be Martínez himself, or a double, narrates three of the novel’s five sections as he creates them; frequently interrupts Emilia Dupuy’s story to share details of his own trauma as an Argentine exile in New Jersey; drops names of his Rutgers colleagues and friends into the narration as a game; and chooses mid-text to shift the narrative away from the ghostly encounter and leave it unresolved while he highlights his own metafictive investigation of Simón’s story, before revealing that the entire text began as a dream he had years ago. The novel’s temporal shifts, blurring of generic borders between fiction and memoir, and willful suspension of conventions regarding logic and reality—all of which are frequent devices in the author’s body of work—are particularly apt tools for framing the fragmented life of a haunted widow. As Martínez asked in 1998, “If those in power have the right to imagine a history that is false, why then shouldn’t novelists attempt with their imaginations to discover the truth?” 54 Purgatorio’s palimpsestic approach to truth as layered and ultimately unknowable, coupled with its ultimate lack of interest in definitively positioning Simón’s return on the side of reality or unreality, privileges deeper issues of trauma and recovery over the impossible task of excavating objective truth. Marcelo Coddou has identified this process as central to the author’s work, noting his predilection for using la capacidad de la imaginación para romper los esquemas de la realidad establecida como tal y, así, acercarse a “la verdad,” dar pasos inéditos hacia ella. Sus novelas, como le gusta repetir, son mentiras, pero son mentiras justificables frente a la hipocresía, el parasitismo, y las debilidades de un sistema corrupto y corruptor. 55 [the imagination’s capacity for breaking through the schema of established reality itself, and, as a result, drawing closer to “the truth,” taking unprecedented steps toward it. His novels, as he likes to point out, are lies, but they are justifiable lies in light of the hypocrisy, parasitism, and weaknesses of a corrupt, corrupting system.]

Purgatorio’s ghost story centers on the disappearance of cartographer Simón Cardoso two months after his marriage to Emilia, the daughter of Doctor Orestes Dupuy, publisher of the influential right-wing national newspaper La República. Publicly, Dupuy shapes the regime’s propagandistic

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patriotic campaigns, which he anchors in a bastardization of terms such as order, cleanliness, progress, and God; privately, he belongs to the inner circle of “The Eel” and orchestrates the vanishing and torture or execution of socalled subversives. 56 Martínez juxtaposes the narrative of Simón’s disappearance with a remembered episode in which Simón unintentionally humiliates Dupuy by condemning torture in a dinner conversation with the president and the vicar. This circular conversation is filled with ghosts, opening with Dupuy himself insisting that “mi gobierno está en guerra con el extremismo comunista, pero no tortura ni mata” 57 [my government is at war with communist extremism, but it doesn’t torture or kill], while the priest defends these supposedly nonexistent acts as a means by which one death can spare many innocent lives. As is typical in the convoluted logic of the dictatorship, the insistence on the non-existence of the disappeared—whom they might frame as casualties of war if the government acknowledged losses on the opposing side in a war it conducts in an invisible yet public manner—twists into a tacit confirmation that these specters are, or have been, present within the country. The dinner episode, almost immediately followed by Emilia and Simón’s imprisonment and his disappearance, serves as the first clue in a ghostly trail that Emilia resists following, but is permanently tethered to, because it also leads to Simón: that of her father’s complicity in her husband’s death. The author/ interlocutor’s piecing together of this mystery through a file of clippings that Emilia clings to—yet refuses to open—exposes her paradox: accepting eyewitness reports that soldiers executed Simón would require her to acknowledge that her father orchestrated the murder, but pursuing leads supplied by an opposing group of supposed eyewitnesses—also invented by her sadistic father—who claim to have seen Simón alive exonerates her father, yet condemns Emilia to decades of reliving his disappearance, as ghost after ghost eludes her. Whichever ghost she chooses to follow, Emilia remains surrounded by death, as her life “de principio a fin es una cadena de pérdidas, desapariciones y búsquedas sin sentido” 58 [from beginning to end is a chain of losses, disappearances, and senseless pursuits]. Unlike Perla, whose postmemory discovery of the truth opens a path toward healing and reconciliation, Emilia remains fully entrenched in loss. While the documentary evidence that she collects—newspaper clippings, interviews, photographs that document the regime’s savagery—forms a centerpiece of the cultural memory that will haunt the second generation, its curator alternates between full immersion in the past and a haunted, hallucinatory present. Emilia’s psychological stagnation in the midst of constant yet fruitless physical pursuit supports psychoanalyst Luis Hornstein’s perspective on the destructive impact of necrophilia on Argentines:

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Her search inscribes her in a state of permanent unknowing in which the dead remain both absent and agitated due to the absence of closure and burial rituals. In a passage strikingly similar to Perla’s assertion of the logic implicit in finding what has been lost, Emilia contemplates the purgatory brought upon her by Simón’s undefined status: “Ya la muerte de la persona amada crea suficiente destrucción. ¿Cuánta más puede haber, entonces, en una muerte que no se sabe si fue muerte? ¿Cómo perder lo que todavía no se ha encontrado?” 60 [The death of a loved one creates destruction enough. How much more destruction, then, can there be in a death that we don’t know to be death? How do you lose what you haven’t yet found?]. When she imagines his return, Emilia envisions a sense of relief in later being able to watch him die—a thought that instantly shames her yet reflects her longing for closure and certainty. Her thirty years in purgatory, rather than allowing her to achieve cleansing and ascend to paradise in keeping with the traditional Catholic notion of this state, have anchored her on the brink of hell, in the agonic realm of the undead. As the author defined his novel, Purgatory is the search. It’s the journey, and during this journey hope is produced, and additionally, it’s not knowing what lies on the other side. It’s hope with an unknown arrival point; . . . it fails because she’s prompted to go from one side to the other, by signs that are like breadcrumbs. 61

The text’s presentation of the vanished—factory workers, farm workers, babies, mothers, even previously buried corpses—extends to the physical and geographic contours of the nation itself, as “ríos, lagos, estaciones de tren, ciudades . . . se desvanecían en el aire como si jamás hubieran existido” 62 [rivers, lakes, train stations, cities . . . came undone in the air as if they’d never existed]. Much like De Robertis’s unseen third city of ghosts who haunt the River Plate’s border cities, Martínez’s Argentina is an unmapped, vanishing nation beyond the margins of consciousness. After Simón and Emilia are arrested at the Huacra military post, on an absurd mission (orchestrated by her father as a means of disappearing his son-in-law) to map an invisible path, images of death become more graphic and public, echoing the regime’s violence that operated as an unmapped yet hidden-in-plain-sight secret. When the Ford Falcon the soldiers transport her in is forced to stop at a railroad crossing, she witnesses a gruesome convoy of cadavers—the disappeared who have been brought into public sight—being transported on train cars as if they were ordinary cargo: “[L]os cuerpos viajaban a la intem-

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perie, indiferentes a la obscenidad de la muerte. Los de adelante estaban cubiertos con plásticos negros que el viento henchía, dejando al descubierto manos, cabezas, piernas” 63 [(T)he bodies traveled exposed to the weather, indifferent to death’s obscenity. Those in front were covered with black plastic swollen by the wind, leaving hands, heads, legs uncovered]. Locked in a basement cell at police headquarters, Emilia passes into an altered state of consciousness, haunted by images of her husband being burned alive, dead newborns, and even God devouring his own Son. As she witnesses the shadows of these crimes against humanity, Emilia perceives that she is “cruzando la frontera de la realidad” 64 [crossing the borders of reality]; yet, for decades she will remain anchored in shadow, constantly perceiving the truth but unable to access it. This sensation intensifies upon her release to her parents, when Emilia discovers that, like her husband, all evidence of their stay in Tucumán has vanished: the hotel bill has been settled, the rental Jeep returned, the desk clerks replaced, as if their time there had been imagined, or “el pasado se retiraba sin dejar huellas” 65 [the past was fading without leaving a trace]. This disconcerting scene echoes the military’s practice of double disappearance, in which photographs of the disappeared were stolen from their families’ homes because, as Diana Taylor has noted, “By disappearing the documentary evidence of a human life, one could erase all traces of the life itself.” 66 Consequently, the specter functions as the only remaining image of the vanished loved one. While the reader has been made aware from the novel’s earliest pages that Simón ostensibly returns home to Emilia, the novel emphasizes Emilia’s decades of unrest as she chases a phantom in “purgatorio . . . una espera de la que no se conoce el fin” 67 [purgatory, a waiting with no known ending], not the man’s perceived physical return. Less than one-fifth of the text explores her reunion with this man/double. Like Perla’s ghost, he appears to no one other than the protagonist, but unlike Perla’s ghost, he accompanies Emilia outside the realm of the home, leading Emilia’s neighbors to suspect that she has gone mad, as she is observed walking through town seeming to talk to herself. Simón’s manifestation—given that he appears carrying the suitcase, maps, and pajamas he had with him thirty years earlier in Tucumán, wearing the same clothes, and physically preserved as a thirty-three-year-old instead of the man in his sixties that he should have become—seems to have been conjured into existence by Emilia’s longing for him. He conveys no significant information about the past three decades and seems to have been summoned from an unseen realm. Perhaps in keeping with Emilia’s childhood view of map-making as a means of “torcer . . . el rumbo del mundo . . . desorientar la lógica de la naturaleza, crear ilusiones allí donde más invencible parecía la realidad” 68 [twisting . . . the path of the world . . . disorienting the logic of nature, creating illusions when reality seemed most invincible], on the returned Simón’s first Saturday night at home with Emilia, he begins

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tracing a map of an island. In a quest that mirrors the endless ghostly trail involved in Emilia’s search for, and repeated loss, of her husband, he observes: La encuentro y cuando trato de ubicarla en el espacio se me va de las manos. Quizá mi error sea ése, quizás en el espacio no hay lugar para ella. Comienzo a dibujarla de otra manera. La dejo sobre el papel y me aparto sólo un momento. Cuando vuelvo a mirarla la isla no está. Se ha perdido. 69 [I find it and when I try to locate it in space, it slips through my fingers. Maybe this is my mistake, maybe there’s no place for it in space. I start to draw it differently. I leave it on the paper and step away for just a moment. When I look at it again, the island isn’t there. It’s been lost.]

This vanishing island reminds Emilia of the true purpose of maps, “impedir que la gente se pierda” 70 [to prevent people from getting lost], while Simón points out the dictatorship’s goal of unmapping its opponents’ lives: “Le habría gustado que vos y yo hiciéramos mapas en los que las personas desaparecieran y se volvieran polvo de ninguna parte” 71 [They would have liked it if you and I made maps people disappeared in, and they became dust, from nowhere]. In this light, Emilia’s lifelong obsession with mapping Simón and documenting photographs, films, and news articles on the disappeared clearly represents a singleminded effort at undoing the disappearance, at mapping him, so that the regime loses its power to “disappear” him for a second time by erasing him from cultural memory. When she locates him, even if only by means of fantasy, she carefully guides him through each area of her daily life in an attempt to anchor him in a tangible realm, yet ultimately decides to follow his phantom into the river—also the point of origin of Perla’s ghost—rather than tying him to her life in exile. In both Perla and Purgatorio, the ubiquity of phantoms in daily life in post-dictatorship and contemporary Argentina adds another layer of meaning to Videla’s infamous description of the disappeared as someone who is neither alive nor dead. The juxtaposition of Emilia’s relentless search for her husband with her father’s decades-long creation of false trails in an ongoing effort to bury the truth demonstrates that those who were disappeared a generation ago remain present not only for their loved ones, but also for their enemies. Her story concludes as she instructs the narrator to dispose of her possessions and moves toward the water, where she claims that her husband awaits her in a sailboat. The narrator’s admonition that the river is too low to navigate fails to deter her, and the novel concludes with Emilia’s planned escape into this “río de nada” 72 [river of nothingness]. Much like Simón’s, then, the resolution of her story remains unknowable. Rather than dying or returning to the quotidian, she hovers in an unreconciled state, leaving the reader haunted by ambiguity. Perla also explores this ongoing haunting for

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both sides of the dirty war, as well as their descendants; unlike Purgatorio, in which the perpetrators of atrocity never seem to be punished. but their victims endure lifelong suffering, De Robertis’s novel forces the perpetrator to acknowledge and suffer for his cruelty and offers hope of reconciliation for both the so-called hinge generation and the nascent third generation. The general ultimately loses the perfect home and family for which he had justified his complicity in the regime’s cycle of violence. Perla spent her teenaged years feeling culpable for a legacy of inherited violence, while her classmates sought their own families’ truth and reconciliation in the dictatorship’s aftermath of mistrust, blame, grief, and diaspora. As Emilia tells Simón’s ghost regarding the unmappable island, the phantom “está en el tiempo entonces. . . . Y si está ahí, tarde o temprano va a volver” 73 [is in time then. . . . And if it’s there, sooner or later it will return]. Given the absence of closure, the incompletion of their lives, and the rupture their disappearance thrusts upon surviving friends’ and family members’ life narratives, both novels demonstrate that the disappeared remain present, haunting both the private and public spheres. Both works poignantly depict what Hirsch describes as “memory culture,” Martínez describes as necrophilia, and Gordon categorizes as haunting. However, while Martínez’s narrative centers on the unresolveable loss that memory and disappearance inscribe upon the first generation of trauma survivors, De Robertis’s novel provides hope for reconciliation for those whom Hirsch describes as the postgeneration. In its narration to “you,” a third-generation interlocutor that carries the legacy of loss; yet, the interlocutor is born into possibility and re-creation, Perla suggests that the hinge generation conceives a way forward for Argentina, one which acknowledges its traumatic cultural memory but integrates this haunted present into a future borne of both pain and regeneration. NOTES 1. Sandra Lorenzano, Escrituras de sobrevivencia (México, DF: Signos/Porrúa, 2001), 46. 2. Carolina De Robertis, Perla (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012); Tomás Eloy Martínez, Purgatorio (México, DF: Alfaguara, 2008). 3. Tomás Eloy Martínez, “Tombs of Unrest,” trans. Richard Swart, Transition 80 (1999): 75. 4. T. Martínez, “Tombs of Unrest,” 84. 5. Avery F. Gordon, “Who’s There?” (2007) http://www.averygordon.net/writinghaunting/whos-there/ (accessed March 3, 2015). 6. Quoted in De Robertis, Perla, n.p. 7. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 73. 8. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 75. 9. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, trans. Cedric Belfrage (1973; New York: Monthly Review, 1997), 307. 10. Tomás Eloy Martínez, La pasión según Trelew (Buenos Aires: Granica, 1973).

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11. Ezequiel Mario Martínez, “Tomás Eloy Martínez: ‘Las dictaduras y los autoritarismos impregnan nuestra vida de irrealidad,’” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 712 (October 2009): 116. 12. E. Martínez, “Tomás Eloy Martínez,” 116. 13. E. Martínez, “Tomás Eloy Martínez,” 115. 14. Lorenzano, Escrituras de sobrevivencia, 54. 15. Carolina De Robertis, The Invisible Mountain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). 16. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, quoted in De Robertis, Perla, n.p. 17. De Robertis, Perla, 5. 18. De Robertis, Perla, 3. 19. De Robertis, Perla, 7. 20. De Robertis, Perla, 18. 21. Ruth Leys in Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 273, summarizes Cathy Caruth, “self” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 131–32n5. 22. Serena Agusto-Cox, “Interview with Author Carolina De Robertis,” June 6, 2012, http:// savvyverseandwit.com/2012/06/interview-with-author-carolina-de-robertis.html (accessed July 5, 2015). 23. Bessel van der Kolk and Onna van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 172. 24. De Robertis, Perla, 40. 25. De Robertis, Perla, 40–41. 26. De Robertis, Perla, 41. 27. De Robertis, Perla, 96. 28. De Robertis, Perla, 97. 29. As Feitlowitz documents, Scilingo’s appearance on March 9, 1995, came one week after respected journalist Horacio Verbitsky’s presentation of recordings of “nearly a year’s worth” of interviews he had conducted with Scilingo. This work was later published in Horacio Verbitsky’s El Vuelo [The Flight] (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1995), which De Robertis acknowledges as a source for her novel. 30. De Robertis, Perla, 105–8. 31. Juliet Simon, “A Q&A with Perla Author Caroline De Robertis on Writing her Way Home,” Everydayebook.com, June 13, 2012, http://www.everydayebook.com/2012/06/a-qawith-perla-author-carolina-de-robertis-on-writing-her-way-home/ (accessed March 3, 2015). 32. Kathleen Brogan, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 17. 33. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, 25. 34. M. Edurne Portela, Displaced Memories: The Poetics of Trauma in Argentine Women’s Writing (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Press, 2009), 20. 35. Brogan, Cultural Haunting, 25. 36. Lorenzano, Escrituras de sobrevivencia, 33; emphasis in original. 37. Roberto Amigo Cerisola, “Aparición con vida. Las siluetas de los detenidos desaparecidos, Historia,” Razón y Revolución 1 (Fall 1995): n.p., http://www.razonyrevolucion.org/ textos/revryr/arteyliteratura/ryr1Amigosiluetazo.pdf (accessed July 28, 2015), quoted in Lorenzano, Escrituras de sobrevivencia, 33–34. 38. De Robertis, Perla, 121. 39. De Robertis, Perla, 122. 40. De Robertis, Perla, 146. 41. De Robertis, Perla, 122. 42. De Robertis, Perla, 126. 43. De Robertis, Perla, 128. 44. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 119. 45. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 119. 46. De Robertis, Perla, 215.

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47. De Robertis, Perla, 215. 48. De Robertis, Perla, 223. 49. De Robertis, Perla, 158. 50. De Robertis, Perla, 233. 51. De Robertis, Perla, 222. 52. De Robertis, Perla, 236. 53. Tomás Eloy Martínez quoted in Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103 54. Martínez quoted in Margalit Fox, “Tomás Martínez, Argentine Author who Merged Fact with Fancy, Dies at 75,” New York Times, February 6, 2010, A17. 55. Marcelo Coddou, “Ideología y política en la obra narrativa de Tomás Martínez,” Hipertexto 8 (Summer 2008): 75. 56. The author uses “El Anguila” (The Eel) to represent General Videla. 57. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 48. 58. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 263. 59. Luis Hornstein quoted in T. Martínez, “Tombs of Unrest,” 79. 60. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 28. 61. Quoted in E. Martínez, “Tomás Eloy Martínez,” 122. 62. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 70. 63. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 63. 64. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 65. 65. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 69. 66. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoires: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 177. 67. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 97. 68. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 19. 69. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 185. 70. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 185. 71. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 185. 72. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 296. 73. T. Martínez, Purgatorio, 185.

Chapter Five

The Literalization of Trauma’s Specter and the Problematization of Time in Aparecidos Charles St-Georges

The relatively unknown 2007 Spanish-Argentine co-production Aparecidos [The Appeared], written and directed by Paco Cabezas, presents an interesting dilemma about the ethics of the cinematic representation of real-life horrors. Even before viewing the film, the DVD cover elicits doubts and even disbelief about the film’s content as it promotes itself as “basada en hechos reales” 1 [based on real events]. The strikingly graphic, genre-specific imagery on the cover and the play on words are unmistakable. Aparecidos is a horror film based on the Dirty War involving Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship (1976–1983) and the estimated thirty thousand desaparecidos [disappeared] who were abducted, tortured, and made to disappear. Given the exploitative agenda generally associated with the horror film industry, one might reasonably question the premise of such a film as Aparecidos. On the other hand, however, the first decade of the twenty-first century has witnessed an increase in Spanish-language gothic films with horrorinflected aesthetics that deal with themes of historical memory and national trauma: most notably Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s fictionalized visitations of the Spanish Civil War in El espinazo del Diablo [The Devil’s Backbone] (2001) and El laberinto del fauno [Pan’s Labyrinth] (2006). 2 Most academic criticism of these films has focused on their role in engaging with the youthful demographic typically associated with gothic horror and in using affect to interpellate a historically distanced generation of viewers into emotionally identifying with the victims of the past: to experience history viscerally. 3 Since the mid-1980s, Argentina has produced films whose goal 85

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is to keep historical memory alive. Rosana Díaz Zambrana categorizes these films as falling “under the rubric of ‘political drama’ such as Camila (1984) and The Official Story (1985) or others such as The Night of the Pencils (1986) or Garage Olimpo (1999), despite the latter two’s intersections with a few subjects and strategies of horror films,” 4 proposing that traditional films are failing to connect with younger viewers. Her analysis of Sudor frío [Cold Sweat] (2010) 5 —an Argentine horror film related to the Dirty War, shown on commercial screens throughout the country after the release of Aparecidos to DVD—points to the potential of horror films to engage young, disaffected viewers in emotionally charged processes of historical memory, despite the wide range of possible interpretations of, and interactions with, such films, and despite the potentially volatile nature of their relationship to historical trauma. In this light, we can explore the thematic axes of Aparecidos not necessarily as commodifications of the horrors of Argentina’s recent national history, but rather as cinematic reflections on these real-life horrors: a visualization of the ghosts that continue to haunt the Argentine national imaginary. In this chapter, I will examine the literalization of not only these ghostly encounters—this mutual pursuit between the film’s protagonists and the ghosts of the disappeared—but also of the retraumatization connected with the reliving of these horrors of the past, keeping in mind Cathy Caruth’s conceptual framework on trauma. My goal is to explore this problematization of the classic concepts of space and time through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida’s specter and examine how it exposes fissures in the rhetoric of chronological time. I seek to examine a possible difference between ghosts and specters—a difference in the way they haunt certain subjects—in order to explore their potential to subvert or at least complicate the notion of history and its claims to offer a coherent, linear narrative for human experience on both institutional and individual levels. APARECIDOS: A NATIONAL ALLEGORY The events of Aparecidos occur in 2001. The protagonists are siblings: Pablo and his older sister Malena. Both were born in Argentina, but shortly after Pablo’s birth, their mother took them to Spain, where they had no further contact with their father. As young adults they have returned to Argentina because their comatose father is dying of cancer, and as his only living relatives, they are charged with putting his affairs in order and making the decision to unplug him from life support. Their return to their native country brings about a certain distancing effect, since they are both Spaniards and bring an outside perspective to Argentina’s national self-reflection.

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Incredibly, neither of them seems to know about the Dirty War or the history of a country that stopped being theirs, before the fall of the dictatorship. They were raised in a free and democratic Spain, having arrived after Franco’s death, which occurred in 1975. Even though Argentina had already suffered several episodes of political repression, inspired at least in part by Franco’s state terror, the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 was doubtlessly the most repressive. When a horrific chapter in Spain’s history finally ended, an uncannily similar history began to write itself in Argentina. Using an old family photo taken when he was a newborn baby just before his mother took him and his sister to Spain, Pablo is eager to reconstruct the memory of a father he never knew. Malena, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with her father or his ghost: her goal is to sign the document authorizing the unplugging of her father from life support, to make the final arrangements, and to return to Spain, but in order to accomplish this, the signatures of two family members are required. Pablo refuses to sign the necessary document until Malena promises to accompany him to Tierra del Fuego to visit their childhood home. They both leave the hospital in their father’s car, which by no coincidence is a Ford Falcon: the vehicle associated with disappearances during the national repression. Just a few minutes into the film, the two have already left the federal capital behind and the car stops on the side of the highway for a take in which the film’s title appears above the Falcon: Aparecidos. For an Argentine audience, the reference is unmistakable: this time, the Falcon will be an agent of appearances rather than disappearances. This doubling of the car’s function establishes the film as a national allegory, representing a kind of palimpsest for the car’s history, and, by extension, the country’s. In her book on temporal critique and postcolonial cinema, Bliss Cua Lim draws from Craig Owens’s metaphor of allegory as a palimpsest when she observes that allegory involves a textual doubling that allows for one level of experience to be constructed through another. 6 She proposes that allegory is a particularly efficient vehicle for culturally specific artistic expression because it contains mechanisms that interpellate a particular audience, 7 as seen in the case of the Ford Falcon. Lim quotes Owens to elaborate on the relationship between palimpsest and allegory: “Typically operating in the perception of a gap [whether this is a generation gap or a gap between a traumatic event and its narration], allegory’s ‘fundamental impulse’ is to ‘rescue from oblivion that which threatens to disappear,’ that is, to alleviate a sense of historical estrangement.” 8 This historical estrangement is literalized in the case of Malena and Pablo, who embody both generational and international estrangement. Two decades after the horrors of the Dirty War, the fear that its history might also eventually disappear continues to haunt the national imaginary. While Malena and Pablo begin to familiarize themselves with the histories of their estranged country and father, they begin to discover that he was linked to the

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disappearances and, specifically, to the torture of detainees. Early on, Pablo discovers a mysterious book that appears to be a personal diary containing fragments of documentation: fragmented testaments about something that he can’t make out at first. He doesn’t know how to read this text correctly in order for it to make sense (in the traditional sense of causal, linear narrative). His inability to understand this unofficial history book echoes the national allegory in which those who were not directly impacted by the dictatorship’s repression (including, of course, the generations of Argentines who were born or grew up afterward) are physically and chronologically distanced from the events of the Dirty War. Just like Pablo, those who were not directly affected by the repression must reconstruct its horrors through history books and oral histories. Notwithstanding, it is one thing to read a history book and quite another to understand what is read. This critical difference is what Caruth describes as the “movement from literal to figurative seeing,” 9 which is a key part of beginning to understand trauma. Pablo slowly begins to both literally and figuratively “see” the unofficial history book he’s found, and sporadically, clues are revealed that lead him and Malena to several encounters with the ghosts of a family of victims so that step by step, they learn more about their story, exemplifying in literalized fashion Jules Michelet’s concept of historiography, described by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott “as a discourse with the dead.” 10 After seeing the name of a hotel in the mysterious book, Pablo convinces Malena to spend the night there in the room next to the one that is referenced in the book. They are both awakened by the sounds of the father of the previously mentioned ghost family being murdered. Frightened, they leave the hotel and start driving away before spotting the mother and the daughter alongside the road. Another, more ominous Ford Falcon pulls up behind them, and the two are abducted by mysterious, invisible agents in what will become a series of repeated reenactments of the family’s story throughout the film. While textual and photographic evidence are literally revealed to him about the horrors of the past, sporadically and magically appearing in the mysterious book on what had previously been blank pages, Pablo finds a Polaroid picture in which his sister Malena appears as a tortured detainee. Before arriving in Tierra del Fuego, Pablo decides to separate himself from her in order to return to the old hotel and learn more about the past to keep the disturbing photo of Malena from becoming reality. Malena arrives on her own at Tierra del Fuego and visits an “almacén de recuerdos” 11 [souvenir shop] that also doubles as a records office, just as the word “recuerdos” in Spanish doubles for “souvenirs” and “memories.” Even though it is about to close, the employee invites Malena in after she explains how urgently she needs access to documents related to her dying father. During her search, Malena uncovers newspapers and archives that reference the role of “El Doctor” in murders and disappearances. Seeing her interest in the story, the

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employee makes coffee for her and shows Malena her personal photo album, explaining that her husband was detained and killed by the Argentine AntiCommunist Alliance. She tells her about her personal trauma, motivated by an ethical obligation to share her story with the next generation. Despite her tears, she insists that “no me hace daño esto, no” 12 [no, this doesn’t hurt me]. The narration of the horrors of her personal history “[n]o debe hacerme daño” 13 [shouldn’t hurt me], the woman says, because it forms part of a national history that must be actively remembered if it is to avoid repeating itself. The following day, Malena arrives at her childhood home—her father’s house—but doesn’t find Pablo. Upon entering the house, she is transported back in time and becomes one of her father’s detainees, suffering a literalized torture at the hands of her father’s ghost and witnessing the torture of the same pregnant woman whose ghost had appeared to her previously. She sees that her father performs a caesarian operation on the mother and then leaves her to die, keeping the male baby and naming him Pablo. After surviving the bloody encounter with their father’s ghost and after discovering the criminal context of Pablo’s birth and kidnapping, both siblings realize that their worldview has forever changed as a result of the path of knowledge that has defined their journey to Argentina. In the final scene, they are both stuck in a traffic jam on a bright afternoon in a very public, widely recognized area of Buenos Aires in front of the Palacio de Justicia [Palace of Justice]. When the sky suddenly becomes dark and it begins to rain, the siblings begin to see that the streets are full of the ghosts of the disappeared: ghosts that no one else seems to see, thus calling attention to the relativity of perspective, memory, and history. TRAUMA’S SPECTER The public, urban space in which the film ends closes the space between Malena and Pablo’s family history and Argentine national history. As previously mentioned, allegory finds its function in a gap, but as Caruth observes, this is a multidimensional gap. The traumatic road traveled by Malena and Pablo, for example, fills the gap between ignorance and knowledge. One could dispute this reference to the protagonists’ experience as trauma in clinical terms since they themselves were not persecuted by the military dictatorship. The film’s plot, however, complicates notions of personal experience by turning Malena into one of her father’s tortured detainees. Whether or not this is a literalized metaphor for her personal identification with the actual victims, we see her live and survive the traumatic events in question, which, according to Caruth, is what constitutes trauma in and of itself. Leaving the site of trauma to go on living one’s life with the haunting memory of

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the event is what makes the experience traumatic. A departure from the original site will demand a repeated return as long as the survivor is still alive, since in order to return (to remember), one most leave (survive). When Malena speaks to the woman at the records office, we observe that her trauma is located precisely in the fact that she survived what her husband did not: that she was able to leave the site of trauma and her husband was not. ¿Sabés qué fue lo que más me dolió? No fue la picana, ni las violaciones. . . . A mí lo que más me dolió fue la última vez que vi a Mario con vida. . . . . Me acuerdo que lo vi muy mal y pensé que yo también debía estar así, ¿no? que debía ser como mirarse en un espejo. . . . En el 82 me vine acá, a Tierra del Fuego, y abrí este almacén de recuerdos. Y yo intenté olvidar. 14 Do you know what hurt me the most? It wasn’t the electric prod, or the rapes. . . . What hurt me the most was the last time I saw Mario alive. . . . I remember seeing him in really bad shape and thinking that I should be that way too, you know? That it should’ve been like looking in a mirror. . . . In ’82 I came here, to Tierra del Fuego, and I opened this souvenir shop. And I tried to forget.

Despite not having personally witnessed the traumatic incidents narrated by the woman, simply learning about these events produces a kind of trauma within Malena, having also survived the horrific period in which her father was involved, exemplifying “the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another, through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” 15 as well as the fact that “the traumatic nature of history means that events are only historical to the extent that they implicate others.” 16 Caruth proposes that if Freud turns to literature for examples of trauma that he then psychoanalyzes, it is because literature, just as psychoanalysis, is interested in the complex relationship between knowing and not knowing: 17 a relationship that we see exemplified in the story of Malena and Pablo. The limitations of an individual’s capacity for personal experience impede one’s knowledge, but even when one personally experiences or witnesses an event, one is not always able to fully understand it, thus exemplifying the gap between seeing and understanding: between “literal” and “figurative seeing.” 18 The event is not available in its totality to the consciousness of the individual and consequently returns over and over again, lurking in the unconscious: “[T]rauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.” 19

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The individual must revisit these events in order to process and begin to understand them, or perhaps more correctly, the events must revisit the individual: a process that is literalized in Aparecidos with the reappearances of ghosts from the past and the reappearance of text that literally reveals itself to Pablo throughout different moments of his rereading of the mysterious book, summoning him as if it were an animate being: “[I]t is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in an attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available.” 20 According to Derrida, specters are defined by their ability to keep coming back as well as by what he calls the visor effect. 21 They make us feel that we are the object of the gaze, which produces an unsettling, haunting effect that is literalized in Aparecidos. While the occasional appearances of ghosts, texts, and photographs offer Malena and Pablo a glimpse into what would otherwise be invisible, the lingering, spectral reminder that this is only one story out of thousands that constitute an invisible and thus unknowable whole is what ultimately haunts the national imaginary. “TIME IS OUT OF JOINT”: THE POROSITY OF TIME The space from which specters view us is opened up and made possible through disjuncture: a concept that is analogous with injustice, according to Derrida, 22 who uses the Shakespearean example of Hamlet to illustrate this dynamic. The injustice of the murder of Hamlet’s father and the pending obligation that he feels cause him to declare that “time is out of joint.” 23 This same sense of injustice and obligation is what has caused the subject of Argentina’s Dirty War to continue demanding public attention through various cinematic reincarnations, although Aparecidos is the first of these films to literalize this spectral interpellation. The notion of time being out of joint is particularly salient in a scene from La historia oficial [The Official Story] (1985)—Argentina’s most well-known film about the Dirty War—in which Ana describes how she was tortured and detained and how it was difficult to apply an exact chronological order to these traumatic events: “No estoy segura si fue ese mismo día. Perdí un poco la noción del tiempo. . . . Todavía me despierto ahogada a la mañana. Estoy allí colgada; me meten la cabeza en un tacho de agua. Después de siete años, todavía me ahogo. Cuando salí de allí me dijeron que había estado 36 día” 24 [I’m not sure if it was that same day. I kind of lost the notion of time. . . . I still wake up drowning in the morning. I’m hanging there; they stick my head in a bucket of water. After seven years, I’m still drowning. When I got out of there they told me I had been in for 36 days]. The thirty-six days that were reported to her belong to an institutionalized chronological system that claims to provide a coherent referential backdrop

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upon which human experience can be measured. Having studied the theory of Henri Bergson, Bliss Cua Lim observes that while time converts individual experiences into uniformly measured intervals, the clock that represents this homogeneous and empty notion of time “does not tell the truth of duration but exemplifies a socially objectivated temporality, one that remains ‘indispensable but inadequate’—a necessary illusion that must be exposed.” 25 The thirty-six days that are given to Ana as objective information are not compatible with her experience: they aren’t coherent or relevant to her. The experience that she survived is inherently incoherent. As evidenced by the fact that she seems to be asphyxiating as she’s relating her story to Alicia, the passing of time has done nothing to distance Ana from the thirtysix days of her detention. In a logical world in which historical chronology functioned as it claims to, Ana would have stopped feeling like she was “drowning” seven years ago. Notwithstanding, she continues to struggle for breath every morning when she wakes up as if time had not removed her from the torture chamber. In other words, Ana’s life cannot be explained or measured through logic: it resists the coherent narrative offered by historical chronology, thus exposing its inherent fissures. Similar to the previously mentioned gap that lies between knowing and not knowing, between the occurrence of an event and its textualization, and between one generation and the next, there is also a gap between Ana’s anachronistic temporality and the chronological order that governs the society in which she continues to live. This calling into question of the notion of time, then—this dissonance between individual experience and the social narrative of chronology—is something that is literalized in Aparecidos: a film that functions as an allegory in the gap between the personal histories of the characters and national history, but also as fantastic cinema in the gap between personal experience and social narrative. According to Lim, “fantastic narratives strain against the logic of the clock and calendar, unhinging the unicity of the present by insisting on the survival of the past or the jarring coexistence of other times.” 26 The fact that living characters such as Malena and Pablo appear on screen alongside characters that were murdered during the dictatorship and the fact that they interact and converse with them as if they were present in the flesh is what classifies the movie as fantastic cinema: it cannot be considered realistic because ghosts only exist in one’s imagination and the diegetic events of the plot cannot be explained through a rational or objective system. In terms of the anachronistic and illogical contradictions that characterize human experience on an individual level, perhaps fantastic cinema could paradoxically be interpreted in some contexts as better suited than other genres to represent time as it is experienced: particularly lives marked by the irrationality of trauma. Caruth proposes that “historical memory . . . is always a matter of distortion, a filtering of the original event through the fictions of

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traumatic repression, which make the event available at best indirectly.” 27 She concludes that “history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.” 28 This paradox can be applied not only to collective history, but also to personal history, since each individual is confined within the limits of his or her body and ontological experience, and a consciousness of someone else’s experience is subject to the expressive filters that make its transmission possible. The subjectivity and surreal nature of individual experience is illustrated in one scene in particular: a scene that invokes uncanny similarities to social reality during the dictatorship. The day after their first encounter with the ghost family, Malena and Pablo stop at a gas station. Pablo starts to leaf through the mysterious book trying to figure out what happened to the mother and the daughter after the father’s murder. He comes across a photograph of the girl’s corpse with the time “12:25” written on the back. He gazes at his watch, which says 12:15, and he notices a suspiciously old pickup truck parked just a few meters away: a truck that is anachronistically present. After finding the daughter and the mother trapped inside, Pablo rescues the girl and promises to come back for the mother. He takes off from the gas station at full speed only for the ghostly pickup truck with its notably invisible driver to catch up to them on the highway. The truck rams the car enough times to render it immobile and, after coming to a stop, the three of them exit the vehicle and run to a roadside restaurant, thinking they will find safety in public space with other people. They enter the restaurant visibly terrified. Pablo even has blood on his face, but the indifferent patrons keep watching the soccer game on television. Malena calls the police to report the emergency, but as she attempts to describe what has happened, she realizes that her story, just like the mysterious book at first glance, doesn’t make sense. Read within the social framework of what constitutes reality in the public sphere, her story is not only improbable: it’s incomprehensible. Words fail her when she attempts to describe what has happened to her. She can’t even give the police operator her location (another piece of information that is necessary in order for her story to have any coherence): “Es que no sé muy bien dónde estoy. Ya llamo en otro momento” 29 [It’s just that I don’t really know where I am. I’ll call back later]. They believe they have saved the girl from her tragic fate, but at exactly 12:25, blood begins to leak from her chest. A few moments later, she goes flying violently through the air as if suspended by a meat hook. After hanging in the air for a few seconds, she falls “dead” to the floor. No one else in the restaurant seems to have seen this terrifying event: a public blindness that recalls the period of the Dirty War, specifically in 1978 when the World Cup was held in and won by Argentina amid human rights abuses two years into the military dictatorship. Just as in 1978, in the restaurant, public attention remains distracted by the soccer game. A man sitting at

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a nearby table has been splattered with blood and doesn’t even seem to notice, thus insinuating the guilt of a large part of society that pretended not to see anything during the dictatorship. Horrified, Pablo exclaims, “No lo puedo creer. Nadie nos va a ayudar” 30 [I can’t believe it. No one’s going to help us]. This scene exemplifies the concept of “heterotemporality” initially proposed by Dipesh Chakrabarty 31 and explored by Lim throughout her book. 32 A moment supposedly shared between Malena, Pablo, the girl, and the other occupants of public space that represent society—12:25 p.m.—has actually been a moment experienced in sharply contrasting and contradictory ways. The dramatic heterogeneity of experience literally played out under a clock that represents the homogeneity of chronological order puts into perspective the porosity and subjectivity of the notions of time and history: institutionalized notions that claim to give human experience an objective narrative. CONCLUSION: GHOSTS AND SPECTERS Just as Caruth observes, “incomprehensibility [is] at the heart of catastrophic experience”; 33 in Aparecidos we have seen how the literalization of the atemporality and heterotemporality of human experience—and particularly traumatic experience—exposes ruptures in the notion of time and unsettles its purported comprehensibility. According to Amy Kaminsky in her essay on Garage Olimpo—another film that addresses the horrors of the Dirty War— this is precisely the reason why the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo give the memory of their disappeared loved ones over to the institution of time. They are opposed to the construction of a monument to the disappeared, preferring instead to leave open “the wounds inflicted by the state,” since “monuments are fixed in place and eventually become part of the landscape” and “narratives of state terror allow us to remember viscerally.” 34 In other words, they want the victims of the Dirty War to continue resisting visible form in order to continue performing their function as specters: watching and calling out, haunting memory, and serving as reminders of the disjuncture that is inherent in their absence. According to Caruth, any trauma implies a departure from the original site followed by a repetitive return to that site: a return that Derrida might say is facilitated and demanded by the specter of injustice. In the case of Aparecidos, the literalization of the specter helps identify its deconstructive function in terms of the official and institutionalized ways in which a coherent narrative is claimed to be possible in order to describe and make judgments about human experience. This haunting, subversive potential is discussed by Peter Buse and Andrew Stott in the introduction to their book Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History. 35 In the same book, Ruth Parkin-Gounelas

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observes that “Ghosts are untimely/anachronous (with the Greek prefix ‘ana’ carrying the idea of repetition) in their disturbance of the distinction between beginnings and returns as well as between death and life. 36 The reason that the theme of repetition is inherent in the concept of anachrony—and the reason the trope of the specter returns time and again in literature and film—is because the systems that have become institutionalized under the pretext of projecting a cohesive narrative onto human life— systems such as chronological time, with its arbitrary point of departure and its fictitious beginnings and endings—are incapable of fulfilling their promise. They always leave something unresolved, something unexplained or unexplainable, to come back and haunt individual and social consciousness. One cannot help but acknowledge the haunting impossibility of comprehending the horrors of Argentine history and its victims, who must return in spectral fashion to fulfill their deconstructive function: as reminders, paradoxically, of the importance of their history as well as the impossibility of history in general. They obsessively remind of the inadequacy of systems of knowing. In Aparecidos, while the ghosts of the victims appear, those who are responsible for their abduction remain invisible. Notwithstanding, the perpetrators’ lingering presence is perceived and the consequences of their actions play out in strikingly visual fashion, thus underscoring the inherent injustice in their impunity as well as a conceptual difference between ghosts and specters that I would like to propose for the case of Aparecidos by borrowing and reworking some of Jacques Derrida’s terminology in Specters of Marx. The space from which specters view the world is opened up and made possible through temporal disjuncture: a concept that is analogous with injustice. 37 While ghosts appear and are recognized as ghosts, specters remain invisible but hauntingly present. Specters cannot be seen, but their perception of the world can be perceived: Derrida’s visor effect. 38 As bodiless embodiments of spirits past, ghosts can be conjured according to the grammar of social subjectivity. They assume recognizable identities and represent specific social subjects who once inhabited a body but whose spirit takes on a visible presence. Specters, on the other hand, perpetually problematize the possibility of justice because of the particular way in which they haunt: as a faceless imperative that is sensed but cannot be fully recognized or made sense of. In the introductory chapter of Specters of Marx, Derrida references the “paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible” as the defining characteristic that “distinguishes the specter or the revenant from the spirit, including the spirit in the sense of a ghost in general.” 39 He then goes on, throughout the book, in circular and Derridian fashion, to complicate any concise, fixed definition of these terms—spirit, ghost, revenant, specter—thus rendering their applicability as categorical terms

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nearly impossible, in stark contrast to Tzvetan Todorov’s writings on the fantastic. While Todorov, as a structuralist, set out to establish terms for the categorization of literature into genres, as a deconstructionist, Derrida was fundamentally opposed to this end: particularly in Specters of Marx, which itself, as a text, is difficult to categorize in terms of literary theory, cultural theory, phenomenology, or general philosophy. It is my argument, however, that in the context of Aparecidos and the stark difference between the spirits of the victims and those of the perpetrators—and more importantly, the difference between the ways in which they haunt the protagonists and are made (in)visible to viewers—two different terms are necessary to describe these spirits and their implications for temporality. While I concede that this difference falls upon a continuum (a continuum upon which Derrida slides back and forth in his book) rather than a binary, what most interests me is the way in which recognizable ghosts can be viewed as improperly inhabiting time—as spirits whose time is out of joint due to a past injustice defined as such according to the reigning logic and temporal parameters of an ideologically established here-and-now—and the way in which unrecognizable specters can cause those who perceive its gaze to feel themselves out of joint with time. The specter “looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before or beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion.” 40 While, as mentioned, Derrida elaborates on this concept throughout his entire book in ways that are beyond the scope of the present study, I would like to propose that ghosts, as I have just outlined them here in terms of their recognizability and in terms of the function they carry out in Aparecidos, constitute fragments of an inaccessible, incoherent whole for whose representation they are conjured. In other words, ghosts are symptoms or manifestations of specters. They offer glimpses into the otherwise ineffable, incomprehensible, and unrepresentable horror of traumatic events. Ghosts provide fleetingly coherent subjects through whom some kind of graspable story can be narrated through pieced-together fragments of an ineffable, invisible, shattered whole, whether this whole is the entirety of any one person’s lived experience, the entirety of the Dirty War itself, or the idea(l) of justice. While attempts can be made to make some sense of the specter and attribute a reason to its lingering, faceless existence, the spectral imperative that imposes its gaze is an impossible one. How can justice be measured and carried out in actionable terms? In the case of murder, how much time served in jail is appropriate for justice to have been served? In the case of compensation for the victim’s families, how much money is appropriate? And in the case of a systematic campaign by a government to carry out an ideological genocide against its own citizens? Despite the impossibility of carrying out

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any kind of appropriate, proportional justice that somehow sets things right, makes peace with ghosts, puts them back in their place, and sets time back on its proper hinges, the spectral imperative to take up a lifelong struggle to remember the past and wrestle with the idea of justice to/for the past is what haunts Argentina’s national imaginary—at least for some. One must not forget, after all, that political debate consists of competing national imaginaries, and the struggle for justice and historical memory has not been as steady one, with limits on indictments being placed after the 1985 Juicio a las Juntas and President Carlos Menem’s eventual 1989 proclamation of immunity for the perpetrators: a proclamation that was not overturned by the nation’s supreme court until 2005. Due to this legal back-and-forth, the way in which Argentina’s national imaginaries were haunted—imaginaries in plural since a portion of the population insisted and continues to insist on the generals’ innocence of any wrongdoing—has changed rather dramatically through time. The spectral imperative for justice is a historically specific one. Despite the impossibility of proportional justice, it is highly significant that in comparison to neighboring countries with similar histories of repression, Argentina has made and is continuing to make a considerable effort to struggle for justice on the different levels at which such a concept can be implemented—especially since 2005. Some kind of relationship likely exists between this event and the filming and subsequent release of Aparecidos on the film festival circuit in 2007. Since the film’s release, former military leaders such as Jorge Rafael Videla and Reynaldo Bignone have been tried, sentenced, and incarcerated for their crimes: a slow, grueling process whose significance has not gone uncontested in its significance within the national imaginary. Even more haunting than the nation’s divided consciousness with respect to the clearly dramatic events of the past—the hauntingly dramatic difference in their concepts for justice—is the possibility that, with the passing of time, this specter will cease to perform its haunting function. As Jo Labanyi has pointed out in “History and Hauntology” in post-Franco Spain, “there are many kinds of ghosts” and “there are various ways of dealing with them,” including “refus[ing] to see them or shut[ting] them out.” 41 Of course ghosts, like other blank surfaces upon which the ideologically inflected narratives of subjectivity are projected, are far from self-evident beings that exist through some kind of original and self-same essence. This dynamic is illustrated in the ending scene of Aparecidos in which the siblings begin to see a multitude of ghosts that they had previously failed to see (and that people occupying the same public space still fail to see), as well as in the scene in the roadside diner in which the patrons and staff fail to see the ghost of the little girl and the dramatic and gruesome reenactment of her murder at the hands of perpetrators who enjoy, as power does, a more absolute level of invisibility.

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Ghosts themselves and the films in which they appear are subject to multiple and often contradictory readings. Somewhere between the camera’s historically and ideologically positioned gaze and that of the viewer lies the possibility of which ghosts will be seen, in what light they will be seen, and how they will be interpreted: what their piecing together will ultimately mean. NOTES 1. According to the Internet Movie Database, Aparecidos went straight to DVD in 2008 after screenings at various international film festivals in 2007 and 2008, only making a brief appearance on select Argentine screens at the end of 2009. In a 2008 interview with Álvaro Oliva, director Paco Cabezas asserts that Aparecidos was meant to be a risky film and that taking those risks meant limiting its commercial success (Paco Cabezas, Aparecidos, directed by Cabezas, DVD [2007; Buenos Aires: SBP Worldwide, 2010]). 2. Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, and David Muñoz, El espinazo del Diablo, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Spain; Mexico: Warner Sogefilms AIE; US: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001; Columbia TriStar Entertainment, 2004); and Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, and David Muñoz, El laberinto del fauno, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Mexico: Warner Brothers, 2006; New Line Home Entertainment, 2007). 3. See Adriana J. Bergero, “Espectros, escalofríos y discursividad herida en El espinazo del diablo. El gótico como cuerpo-geografía cognitiva-emocional de quiebre. No todos los espectros permacen abandonados,” Modern Language Notes 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 433–56; Ellen Brinks, “‘Nobody’s Children’: Gothic Representation and Traumatic History in The Devil’s Backbone,” JAC 24, no. 2 (2004): 291–312; Jane Hanley, “The Walls Fall Down: Fantasy and Power in El laberinto del fauno,” Studies in Hispanic Cinema 4, no. 1 (January 2008): 35–45; Anne E. Hardcastle, “Ghosts of the Past and Present: Hauntology and the Spanish Civil War in Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 15, no. 2 (2005): 119–31; and Silvana Mandolessi and Emmy Poppe, “Dos estéticas de lo sobrenatural: lo siniestro en El espinazo del diablo y lo abyecto en El laberinto del fauno de Guillermo del Toro,” Confluencia 27, no. 1 (Fall 2011): 16–32; as well as Laura Podalsky’s book-length study of the deployment of affective mechanisms in Latin American cinema and their relationship to processes of experiential knowledge (The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011]). 4. Rosana Díaz Zambrana, “Entre placer y conciencia: El horror real(ista) en el filme argentino Sudor frío,” Polifonía 2, no. 1 (2012): 148. 5. Adrián García Bogliano, Ramiro García Bogliano, and Hernán Moyano, Sudor frío, directed by Adrián García Bogliano, DVD (2010; Buenos Aires, Argentina: Walt Disney Company, 2010). 6. Bliss Cua Lim, Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 156. 7. Lim, Translating Time, 176. 8. Lim, Translating Time, 156; emphasis mine. 9. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 37. 10. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, “Introduction: A Future for Haunting,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Buse and Scott (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 5. In their end notes, the authors refer to Michel de Certeau’s reflections on Jules Michelet’s concept of historiography in The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 2, who references Jules Michelet, “L’Héroïsme de l’esprit,” unpublished project from the preface of L’Histoire de France, 1869, in L’Arc 52 (1973): 3–17. 11. Cabezas, Aparecidos. 12. Cabezas, Aparecidos, at 01:00:19.

The Literalization of Trauma’s Specter and the Problematization of Time in Apar- 99 ecidos 13. Cabezas, Aparecidos; emphasis mine. 14. Cabezas, Aparecidos, at 01:01:55. 15. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 8. 16. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18. 17. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 3. 18. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 37. 19. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4. 20. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4; emphasis mine. 21. Specters (1994), 7. 22. Specters (1994), 27. 23. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, quoted in Specters (1994), 29. 24. Luis Puenzo and Aída Bortnik, La historia oficial, directed by Luis Puenzo, DVD (Argentina: Historias Cinematográficas Cinemania, 1985; Koch Lorber Films, 2004); English version, The Official Story, DVD, at 00:24:00. 25. Lim, Translating Time, 9. 26. Lim, Translating Time, 11. 27. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 15. 28. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 18. 29. Puenzo and Bortnik, La historia official (The Official Story). 30. Puenzo and Bortnik, La historia official (The Official Story). 31. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 95. 32. Lim, Translating Time, 25. 33. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 58. 34. Amy Kaminsky, “Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo: Cinema of Witness,” Jump Cut 48 (Winter 2006): n.p., http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc48.2006/GarageOlimpo/text.html (accessed April 27, 2011). 35. Buse and Stott, “Introduction,” 10. 36. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, “Anachrony and Anatopia: Spectres of Marx, Derrida and Gothic Fiction,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Scott (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 102. 37. Specters (1994), 27. 38. Specters (1994), 7. 39. Specters (1994), 7. 40. Specters (1994), 7; emphasis mine. 41. Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 65.

Chapter Six

Phantom Children Spectral Presences and the Violent Past in Two Films of Contemporary Spain Sarah Thomas

What is it about dead children that so unnerves us? Or appeals to us? The number of contemporary films from diverse contexts featuring spectral children suggests that the ghostly child holds a privileged—and troubling—place in the modern imaginary. While the representation of children from beyond the grave takes many forms, from the sinister to the saccharine, what is indisputable is that the ghostly child is ubiquitous in contemporary cinema. Among recent offerings and co-productions from Spain, several films feature child revenants: Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo [The Devil’s Backbone] (2001), and Juan Antonio Bayona’s El orfanato [The Orphanage] (2007) are the most prominent examples, and all enjoyed international box office success. 1 Notably, two of these films—El orfanato and El espinazo del diablo—take place within the walls of orphanages and depict orphan ghosts. Both also focus on the relationships between living children and spectral ones, and interrogate ideas of revenge, repetition, and intergenerational relationships. 2 The presence of ghostly orphans takes on added significance in a nation whose last eighty years have seen a civil war, dictatorship, transition to democracy, and subsequent (and ongoing) debates about the role of historical memory. In this respect, the space of the orphanage and figure of the orphan are neither arbitrary nor coincidental, particularly in light of the involuntary internment of children of Franco’s opponents, abuse in state-run orphanages, and illegal adoptions of children during the dictatorship. This chapter seeks to account for the presence of these ghostly children—all of them orphans, most killed 101

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at the hands of adults—in a nation coming to terms with its past. Focusing primarily on the more recent El orfanato (which does not engage overtly with Spain’s history or politics), and using El espinazo del diablo (which does) as a counterexample, in the following analysis I explore the connections between the ghost and the orphaned child. First, I examine the connection between child, orphan, and ghost in their complex relationship to space and time, and then discuss the different forms of phantoms that the two films portray: both in terms of revenants seeking justice and the psychic haunting of family secrets. Finally, the chapter addresses historical phantoms that haunt Spanish culture through these films as a means of understanding the spectral power of the orphan and orphanage in the cultural imaginary of contemporary Spain. GHOST AND CHILD: LIMINAL FIGURES Both the ghost and the orphan are figures that imply a past of violence, trauma, or loss, rendering them particularly potent in the contemporary Spanish context; as José Colmeiro has noted, “the trope of orphanhood, like the trope of ghosts, has a well established connection in post–civil war Spanish culture, by referring elliptically to the unspeakable horrors of the past and the traumatized identities of its victims.” 3 We can also account for the especially perturbing nature of the child ghost by examining the ways in which both ghost and child—and even more so, orphan—occupy a liminal position in relation to both space and time. The orphan and the orphanage represent a fertile ground for exploring haunting, as they are unheimlich in a quite literal sense. Despite the image of the orphanage as cold, institutional, or penitentiary, most bear the word “home” in their name (home for orphans, home for lost children, etc.), including the children’s homes known as casas cuna in Spain lately in the news for scandals regarding stolen children. 4 The orphanage as space serves as a home rendered unhomely, a home without a family, and often, both in history and the cultural imaginary, a space of discipline not unlike a prison. The figure of the orphan also occupies a liminal position—a child positioned between two families (the lost biological family and as-yetundiscovered adoptive family) and without a permanent home in which to reside. The resident of the orphanage thus represents a figure that is defined by its in-betweenness, aligning the orphan with the ghost. A number of theoretical approaches to the ghost, perhaps most prominently Jacques Derrida’s, have considered the ghost as an in-between figure that denies binary temporal oppositions. The ghost represents the past returned to haunt the present, a figure seeking reparation or justice for the event or action that rendered it ghostly. The ghost’s rupture of the boundary between life and death is its defining characteristic, as Hélène Cixous has

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elegantly explained: “What is intolerable is that the Ghost erases the limit which exists between the two states, neither alive nor dead; passing through, the dead man returns in the manner of the Repressed. It is his coming back which makes the ghost what he is.” 5 The figure of the ghost troubles the concept of linear time, allowing multiple chronologies to coexist simultaneously; as the medium Aurora’s (Geraldine Chaplin) assistant in El orfanato states during the séance they stage at the orphanage, “el pasado, el presente, y el futuro se sobreponen y se cruzan” 6 [the past, the present, and the future overlap and crisscross]. Invoking a classic conception of the ghost, Aurora then explains to protagonist Laura (Belén Rueda) and her husband (Fernando Cayo) that the knot connecting these time frames is the remnant of something terrible that happened in a certain place—the event that engenders the ghost. This terrible event from the past is what the ghost is condemned to repeat until it finds justice, reparation, or revenge in the present. In this sense, the ghost not only challenges linear time by bringing the past into the present, it also does so by introducing a repetition loop that continues to return the present to the past. Both films overtly address this nature of the ghost. In El espinazo del diablo, Doctor Casares (Federico Lupi) meditates on the nature of the ghost in his opening voice-over: “un evento terrible condenado a repetirse una y otra vez” [a terrible event condemned to repeat itself again and again], “algo muerto que parece por momentos vivo aún” [something dead that at certain moments seems to be alive still], and “un sentimiento suspendido en el tiempo” 7 [a feeling suspended in time]. Likewise, in El orfanato, Aurora explains the presence of specters as “un eco que se repite una y otra vez, esperando ser escuchado” 8 [an echo that repeats time and again, hoping or waiting to be heard]. In addition to the theme of repetition and temporal loops, the ghost’s straddling of temporal (and mortal) boundaries fundamentally defines its nature as a being that denies binary classification as living or dead, past or present. This liminal status also frequently manifests in the ghost’s relationship to space: “Ghosts haunt borders . . . they stand on thresholds, monitory absent presences that forbid entry, or contemptuously turn their backs.” 9 In the Spanish context, Colmeiro has mentioned the “elliptical nature” of ghostly figures, liminal in time and space in “their here-but-not-here borderline existence, between the dead and the living.” 10 The child ghosts in both films frequently occupy borders, thresholds, archways, and other liminal spaces. Santi (Junio Valverde) in El espinazo del diablo repeatedly appears in the arches of the orphanage kitchen or in the doorway leading to the basement, or looks at the living boys across windowsills; in Laura’s first encounter with El orfanato’s main ghost, Tomás (Óscar Casas), he pushes her across a threshold, slamming her fingers in the door and then staring at her ominously through its pane of frosted glass. 11 In both films, the ghosts’ complex relationship to time and space also derives from their child status: the child, much like the ghost, is a figure that

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inhabits multiple binary oppositions in time, albeit in a very different way from the ghost. Symbolically, the child can call up both a past temporality— a nostalgia for an idyllic past, or the recall of one’s own childhood self and experiences—as well as a future moment, the child’s anticipated growth into an adult. Both films underline the ways in which the child—and the adult he or she has/will become—embodies precisely this kind of overlapping temporalities of past, present, and future. This temporal repetition and flux are also underscored in the films’ living adults: both films feature characters that have remained in or returned to the physical space of the orphanage in which they themselves grew up. In the case of El espinazo del diablo’s villain Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), remaining in the orphanage fills him with resentment and rage, a sense that he—like the ghost child Santi that he murdered— cannot move on but is condemned to repeat his past as an unwanted child. He stops at nothing to carry out his plans to rob the orphanage and flee, and the violence he unleashes on the inhabitants of his former home speaks to his disavowal of his childhood years there. Conversely, Laura, the protagonist of El orfanato, actively chooses to return to and reclaim the orphanage where she spent her childhood, perhaps because her fate was different—she was adopted and left the orphanage, leaving behind her companions (whom she eventually discovers were all murdered in the interim). Her return is on somewhat different terms: she plans to open a home for mentally disabled children, exercising more agency than the frustrated Jacinto. Nonetheless, Laura’s return entails a repetition of her own childhood past in the present; she has also repeated the cycle as she has now herself adopted a child, Simón, who neither knows of his adoption or his HIV-positive status. In the ultimate return, Laura eventually joins her murdered childhood friends as a living revenant. Her son Simón, on the other hand, occupies a futureless position, condemned to an eternal present: his favorite story is Peter Pan, and he comments to Laura—under the influence of his ghostly friend Tómas—that he will never grow up, like his new (ghostly) friends. After the ghosts reveal to Simón the file that contains his HIV status, he repeats to Laura that he will die. The film plays with this idea of Simón’s mortality precisely to underscore the difference between the adult’s and child’s perspective. Laura, and by extension the viewer, assumes that Simón worries about premature death because of his illness, whereas in fact the ghost Tomás has presciently told him he will die and join the spectral orphans. Because Laura believes Tomás to be a figment of her son’s imagination, she cannot understand Simón’s comments. It is only revealed at the film’s conclusion that it is Laura who kills her son, by unwittingly locking him in the orphanage’s cellar. Both films’ child ghosts occupy, then, a position whose untimeliness is twofold: they are ghosts, belonging to both a past and present, but also children, killed

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before their time and forced, like Simón’s hero Peter Pan, to remain as children forever. The ghostly child represents a particularly troubling figure in this sense, as the child’s death is always untimely, always unjust, always incomprehensible. The child ghost also strikes a particular kind of fear, upending conventional ideas of innocence; it is worth noting, however, that the child ghosts in both films are eventually revealed as not malevolent in their intents or actions, but rather seeking reparation and affective bonds. These bonds are found predominantly with living children, consistently shown to be more perceptive of and receptive to the ghosts than their adult counterparts. In El espinazo del diablo, Carlos (Fernando Tielve) and the other boys befriend and help Santi exact his revenge, just as El orfanato’s Simón adopts the orphan ghosts as his playmates (and eventually joins them). We could account for the living children’s connection to the ghostly ones for a number of reasons—their shared status as children and as orphans, inhabiting the same physical spaces, but also the living children’s imaginative capacity and openness to the ghosts’ visitations. In his writings on the uncanny, Freud comments that the unheimliche often arises when the divisions between reality and imagination are blurred; but the child’s imaginative perspective allows for the breaking down of such dichotomies, which is perhaps why, for Freud, that which arouses fear in adults often does not in children. 12 The living children can tolerate the ghost children’s liminal status—between life and death, presence and absence—and mediate between the ghost and the viewer, gradually revealing the ghosts’ intentions to be less terrifying than we might think. The child and ghost—both liminal others, both temporally in flux— serve to draw the viewer into an uncanny engagement with the past, the living child leading us toward his ghostly counterpart. GHOST STORIES: NARRATIVES OF HAUNTING Although both films highlight the connection between ghostly and living children, the two films’ hauntings are not entirely equivalent. Set in the final days of the Spanish Civil War in an orphanage for children of supporters of the Republic whose parents are dead, missing, or in battle, El espinazo del diablo tells a more traditional ghost story of a wrongful death and the vengeance enacted on its perpetrator. Protagonist Carlos arrives at the orphanage and almost immediately discovers that not only living boys reside there. He is approached by Santi, the ghost of a former resident whom the boys refer to by the epithet “the one who sighs.” Killed by Jacinto for discovering his plot to rob the orphanage, Santi at first inspires fear in Carlos and the other boys; once they determine what he wants from them (assistance in exacting revenge on Jacinto), however, he becomes a kind of companion. He nonethe-

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less remains a harbinger of doom—his ominous warning to the children, “muchos vais a morir” 13 [many of you will die], closely mirrors El orfanato’s ghost Tomás telling Simón he will die before growing up. A number of critics have read the film as both functioning as a standard ghost story and alluding to Spain’s coming to terms (or not) with the horrors of its past of civil war and violence. 14 Del Toro’s choice to set the film in the war period openly invites such a reading, coupling the historical period and the horror genre. Jo Labanyi rightly asserts that the use of haunting as opposed to realism in films including El espinazo del diablo “can be seen as a recognition of the fact that no narrative of atrocities can do justice to the pain of those who experienced such atrocities firsthand,” as well as inviting a vision of modernity that is in dialogue with the past rather than merely seeking to bury it. 15 In such a reading, following Derrida and Avery F. Gordon, the ghost requires something of those it haunts, whether revenge, reparation, or a proper burial. El orfanato, however, in contrast to its predecessor, shows us a different haunting narrative. The ghost children in this film have also been unjustly killed. We discover with Laura that, following her adoption, the few remaining children at the orphanage played a trick on Tomás, a child who wore a burlap sack to conceal facial deformities. The children led him to a nearby sea cave and stole the sack, forcing him to emerge and show his face; he instead chose to remain inside as the tide rose, and eventually drowned. His mother Benigna (Montserrat Carulla), one of the orphanage employees, exacted revenge on the other orphans by poisoning their blackberry pie, forcing them to die a slow and painful death. She later hid their bodies in cloth sacks concealed in the orphanage coal shed. In this narrative the revenge for Tomás’s death has already been enacted, but in the process Beninga has created more unjust deaths, as well as improper burials. Despite Benigna’s vengeance, however, Tomás’s ghost remains in the orphanage, as do those of his fellow orphans—Laura’s former playmates. Laura’s discovery of these secrets takes place as she frantically investigates the disappearance of her own son Simón, following their fight at an open house for the new disabled children’s home she is opening. Simón had refused to go out to meet the new children because he wanted to show his mother “la casita de Tomás” 16 [Tomás’s little house], which we later discover was the hidden basement room where Benigna concealed her son. Laura loses her patience and refuses to play along with what she believes to be Simón’s invention of imaginary friends, but is in fact his communication with the ghosts. This fatal misunderstanding and mistake leads to Simón dying while accidentally locked in the hidden basement room; Laura spends the bulk of the film searching for him, while receiving ghostly visitations and uncovering—literally and figuratively—the secrets of the past. Simón joins the ghostly orphans’ ranks, and at the film’s conclusion Laura commits suicide so that she can stay with them too, a

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Wendy returning to Neverland to take care of the orphan brood for all eternity. What is striking about the ghost story offered by El orfanato is that the ghosts seem not to seek revenge or reparation, but rather an affective connection—first with Simón, and later with Laura. 17 Labanyi has asked, following Gordon’s idea of ghosts arising from improper burials, “what should one do with improperly buried bodies: give them proper burial, or learn to live with their ghosts?” 18 In El orfanato, Laura takes quite literally the second imperative as she not only tolerates the ghosts’ presence in the orphanage but also elects to live with them in death. Before doing so, however, she must learn to communicate with them, as she discovers they are her only hope for finding Simón, whether dead or alive. Gordon has written of the importance of learning to “talk to and listen to ghosts, rather than banish them,” and in Laura’s case this means not only understanding them as ghosts but also, fundamentally, as children. 19 In this sense the ghosts in the film are doubly marginalized, outsiders both as ghosts and children; in both spheres they require a different address and approach than Laura initially understands. In contrast, Simón immediately befriends the ghosts, who sought not revenge but companionship. As a child himself, Simón could listen to the ghosts because he shared their playful and imaginative subjective position, dismissed by his mother as mere figments of his imagination. Laura can only find her son when she agrees to meet the orphans on their own (children’s) terms, imaginatively engaging with them through games and summoning them to appear for her. Simón’s immediate connection to the ghostly orphans also represents yet another kind of repetition, as he takes his mother’s place in the group to which she once belonged. Frozen in time by having been rendered spectral, her former child playmates do not even initially recognize her, for she has grown up and left them behind. They remain children, and thus another child orphan from the next generation, Simón, must take her place in the group. This gesture underscores the sense of repetition established by Laura’s initial return to the orphanage, but also raisies the question of generational transmission, as Simón inherits his mother’s former position. However, Simón’s replacing his mother also requires assuming the untimely death that she herself escaped, as she was adopted only weeks before the tragic events that led to the deaths of the other orphans. The relationships forged between living and ghostly children, then, highlight connections to past injustice, generational repetition, and the possibility of an affective connection to the past prior to a rupture generated by violence and death.

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SECRETS AND PHANTOMS In representing relationships to ghosts seeking not only justice, but also affective connections, El orfanato invites an alternative reading of haunting. For Colin Davis, Nicholas Abraham, and Maria Torok’s psychoanalytic work in The Shell and the Kernel on the phantom and the crypt provides a chronologically prior, yet less-acknowledged, source of hauntology 20 than Derrida’s more pervasive model. For Abraham and Torok, the phantom relates to intergenerational inheritance, specifically of a secret that is traumatic, unspeakable, or shameful. The parent tacitly bequeaths the secret to the child by unconscious means, along with the necessity for the secret to remain concealed. In their formulation, “what haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left in us by the secrets of others.” 21 Esther Rashkin has noted that his process, which Abraham and Torok observed in children of Holocaust survivors as well as keepers of other perilous secrets, functions such that “the child haunted by the phantom, in other words, is unaware that she or he carries another’s secret, and that there is even someone else with a secret.” 22 Alongside the concept of the phantom, Abraham and Torok also conceived of the related idea of the crypt, an inadmissible loss buried deep within the subject. Using Abraham and Torok’s work as a point of departure, we could read El orfanato as a case study in the psychoanalytic haunting of family secrets and their revelation. Before the secret of the children’s deaths is revealed, they lead Simón to discover two secrets his mother has been keeping from him—that he is adopted and that he is HIV-positive—establishing immediately the connection between the phantom and secret knowledge. What’s more, the discovery supposes a rupture between Simón and his mother that leads him away from her and toward the ghostly community, where further secrets remain to be exposed. In a formulation directly mirroring Abraham and Torok’s, during the film’s first portion, Simón is quite literally haunted by a phantom from his mother’s past—Tomás—whose very existence was kept secret. Laura seems to have blocked the memory of Tomás’s existence, unable to recognize him in a photograph depicting Benigna, the other staff, herself, and her orphanage companions. 23 This is partly explained by police psychologist Pilar (Mabel Rivera), who tells Laura that due to his deformity Tomás was kept secret and separate from the other children—in the very literal crypt of the orphanage basement. It however remains puzzling that Laura would not have encountered Tomás during her stay at the orphanage, given that he clearly knew the other children, whose games resulted in his death. When she discovers his “casita” in the orphanage basement, its walls are adorned with his drawings of his fellow orphans, likely including Laura. Tomás, then, serves as a secret from Laura’s past that she may even be keeping from herself, buried in a psychological crypt. Tomás in life was an incarnation of the repressed; he later returns to haunt Simón in the present,

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despite his body having been recovered and his killers avenged. 24 Thus the existence of the phantom Tomás is much more linked to exposing secrets than to achieving revenge or a proper burial, both of which have already taken place. But Tomás’s existence and death are not the only secrets his haunting exposes. In attaching himself to Simón—Laura’s child and a member of the next generation who does not even know that the secret exists—he eventually brings another secret out into the open as Laura discovers the remaining children’s murder that occurred after her departure. The discovery of the secret is fundamental, as “the phantom’s secret can and should be revealed in order to achieve ‘a small victory of Love over Death.’” 25 Laura’s eventual decision to join her son and her former playmates serves as such a small victory, as she denies the finality of death and restores affective bonds it has severed—not only between her and Simón, but also with her childhood companions. In the film’s climactic scene of reunion, after taking an overdose of pills, she awakes, now dead, and asks for the wish that is her reward for finding her treasure the ghosts took in their game—Simón. He awakes too, and makes his own wish—that Laura stay and take care of them forever. The children gather around Laura and Simón, jubilantly recognizing their former playmate now grown old “como Wendy en el cuento” 26 [like Wendy in the story]. Simón prompts his mother to tell the Peter Pan story to the children, enumerating its key elements: “la casita, la playa, los niños perdidos” 27 [the little house, the beach, the lost boys/children]. Laura begins to narrate using Simón’s cues: “Érase una vez una casa . . . que estaba en la playa . . . donde vivían los niños perdidos” 28 [Once upon a time a house . . . that was on the beach . . . where the lost boys lived]. With these fairytale words, the camera pulls back slowly from the children gathered around Laura and the music prevents us from catching any more of the story, except: “como vosotros” 29 [like all of you]. The children seem delighted in fancying themselves a new group of lost boys (and girls) with Laura/Wendy caring for them forever in their spectral Neverland. Despite the happy reunion, the film ends on an ambivalent note, with Laura’s husband coming to leave flowers for his dead wife and son, reminding us that the world of the living goes on, and in that world Laura and Simón are lost forever to those who loved them. LOS NIÑOS PERDIDOS These references throughout the film to Peter Pan and especially to the Lost Boys (in Spanish los niños perdidos) evidently align the orphanage’s ghostly orphans with the characters from J. M. Barrie’s story of children who never grow old. In the Spanish context, however, there is another underlying cultural intertext for los niños perdidos beyond Barrie’s seminal tale: the lost

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children of the Franco dictatorship. In 2002, Ricard Vinyes, Montserrat Armengou, and Ricard Belis published Els nens perduts del franquisme to accompany Armengou and Belis’s 2002 documentary of the same name. Los niños perdidos del franquismo, the Castilian version of the text, appeared the following year. The result of extensive research, it illuminates how the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) systematically separated children from parents deemed unfit due to their political beliefs. While Vinyes, Armengou, and Belis were not the first to discover such cases, both the documentary and book were fundamental in raising consciousness of this dark secret of the not-so-distant past. This chapter in Spain’s history has only recently begun to be discussed in the public sphere. In a 2008 opinion piece (entitled “Los niños perdidos del franquismo”) in Spain’s left-leaning daily El País, political scientist and sociologist Vicenç Navarro writes of the effect on his students at the Pompeu Fabra University when they watch the documentary, completely unaware of this aspect of their own history: “Al entrar en el aula el día siguiente de haberse proyectado tal documental, noté un silencio ensordecedor. Los estudiantes estaban sorprendidos, avergonzados e indignados de que se les hubiera ocultado parte de la historia de su país. Sabían lo que había ocurrido en Argentina y Chile, pero desconocían lo que había ocurrido en España” 30 [When I entered the classroom the day after showing the documentary, I noted a deafening silence. The students were surprised, ashamed and indignant that part of their country’s history had been hidden from them. They knew what had happened in Argentina and Chile, but had no idea what had happened in Spain]. In Spain’s repressive postwar years, when it was essential for Francoism to consolidate its power and eliminate opposition, many of these “niños perdidos” were forcibly taken into state custody, even if they had living parents or relatives who could care for them. Many of the parents had been killed or imprisoned for their political beliefs. While initially female political prisoners were permitted to keep their children with them, this practice increasingly disappeared and a 1940 decree ordered that once the child reached the age of three he or she could no longer remain with the imprisoned mother and would be separated from her, often placed in a state-run or religiously affiliated orphanage. 31 As a result of the law, the state assumed legal custody (tutela) of many of these children; in 1944–1945 alone, thirty thousand children were placed in orphanages under the auspices of the Patronato de San Pablo, an institution responsible for prisoners’ children founded in 1943 by the Ministry of Justice. 32 Many of these children were never reunited with their families. Some were illegally adopted; others remained in custody and eventually rejected their birth families for their ideological orientation following reeducation in orphanages and hogares run by the Falangist Auxilio Social or religious orders. Many ended up joining these orders as a means of “redeeming” the supposed sins of their leftist parents. 33 The authors consider

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these to be Spain’s lost children, following and adapting Argentina’s model. They eloquently describe the Spanish case: Esta enormidad de hijos e hijas, nietos y sobrinos que fueron a parar al Auxilio Social y a otras instituciones públicas y religiosas son nuestros niños perdidos. Lo son en cuanto que “pérdida” significa la privación del derecho que tenían a ser formados por sus padres o familiares, los cuales perdieron a su vez el derecho de criarlos según sus convicciones. No sólo era esto, con ser ya bastante, también significó la desaparición física por un largo período de tiempo, o para siempre. 34 [This enormous number of sons and daughters, grandchildren and nieces and nephews who ended up at the Auxilio Social and other public and religious institutions are our lost children. They are, inasmuch as “loss” means deprivation of the right they had to be brought up by their parents or relatives, who for their part lost the right to raise them according to their convictions. Not just this, which is already enough; [loss] also meant their physical disappearance for a long period of time, or forever.]

That the final lines of spoken dialogue in the film refer to los niños perdidos, then, recall not only the Lost Boys of Neverland, but also the lost children of the Franco dictatorship. The film’s setting in an orphanage—albeit many years after the Spanish civil war—also invites the viewer to consider secrets concealed on a national as well as personal level. Thus despite appearing to lack an overt connection to the Francoist past, El orfanato is nonetheless haunted by the phantom secrets of the lost children of Francoism. 35 El espinazo del diablo links more explicitly to Spain’s past, not only because it is set in 1939 but also as a result of Carlos Giménez’s collaboration as a storyboard artist. Giménez’s comic strip Paracuellos, begun in 1975 as the dictatorship crumbled, depicts his childhood in an Auxilio Social hogar during the postwar. It served as a key popular cultural touchstone of children’s experience in state custody before journalistic and academic offerings. An article from the conservative Spanish daily ABC published just before El espinazo del diablo’s release explains that del Toro had originally planned to set the film in his native Mexico during the Revolution, but: No obstante, la asociación con El Deseo y, sobretodo [sic], el conocimiento de “Paracuellos,” la popular serie del dibujante de cómic Carlos Giménez sobre los hogares del Auxilio Social, le han dado a “El espinazo del diablo” un tono definitivamente español . . . la influencia de su “Paracuellos” se deja notar en personajes, situaciones y “look” de una película “personal, pero con vocación comercial” en opinión de Agustín Almodóvar. 36 [However, the association with (production company) El Deseo and, above all, the familiarity with “Paracuellos,” the popular comic series by the artist Carlos Giménez about the Auxilio Social homes, have given “The Devil’s Backbone”

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Sarah Thomas a definitively Spanish tone . . . the influence of “Paracuellos” can be seen in the characters, situations and “look” of this film, which in Agustín Almodóvar’s opinion is “personal, but with a commercial vocation.”]

Although perhaps unsurprising given that the newspaper is the right-wing ABC, the article does not enter into the political implications of associating the orphanage in El espinazo del diablo with Auxilio Social hogares as depicted in Paracuellos (it is also striking that the association with abuseridden state-run homes is merely said to “give the film a definitively Spanish tone”). While it is certainly true that aesthetically the works resemble one another, their historical circumstances are fundamentally different, given that the orphanage in El espinazo del diablo is run by supporters of the Republic housing children of their own side. Nonetheless, the film leads viewers with knowledge of Spain’s niños perdidos to wonder what the surviving children’s fate will be. As the film ends and the boys flee from Jacinto’s destruction and violence, they emerge into the surrounding landscape, a desolate Castilian plain ringed by mountains. This escape is far from triumphant; the war will be over in a matter of days or weeks. If they survive, these children of the defeated will most likely end up in precisely the repressive NationalCatholic hogares whose representation by Giménez served as the film’s aesthetic inspiration. CONCLUSION: PHANTOMS, REVELATIONS, AND RETURNS In her book Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture, Esther Rashkin proposes that the study of culture further integrate psychoanalytic frameworks, suggesting that cultural studies can make productive use of concepts like Abraham and Torok’s phantom. Drawing from their work, Rashkin argues that phantoms are not merely unspeakable secrets in private family relations but that the phantom can also haunt the national or collective unconscious, as “the phantom permits us to rethink and retheorize certain kinds of political and historical conditions as not just potentially pathogenic, but as possibly phantomogenic.” 37 Perhaps such a model accounts for the repeated presence of both the ghost and the orphan, often bound together in figures like Santi, Carlos, Tomás, Simón, and the other children in these films. While neither film actively treats the niños perdidos of the Franco dictatorship, these figures—long kept secret in the past, such that many in the present did not know their secret existed—haunt the two films literally and figuratively. Their ghostly orphans cannot help but recall the thousands of Spanish children whose forced separations from their families are only just coming to light. While many critics have read El espinazo del diablo as a film that seethes with haunting presences of fratricidal violence and the desire not to bury the past, or interpreted El orfanato as a film that suggests the

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unburying of mass graves, the phantom connection to the orphanages of the early Franco period remains to be explored further; one of the aims of this chapter has been to open such a line of inquiry. 38 Examining the two films together, in particular their emphasis on liminality, the revelation of secrets, and the returns and repetitions of both ghostly and human figures, helps to illuminate the presence of these phantoms in the collective unconscious. Particularly in the context of emerging scandals of children illegally purchased or adopted long after the initial postwar period (and even into the democracy), the figure of the child ghost, wrongfully killed (in the case of Santi) or taken from his mother (Simón), takes on an even more immediate power and appeal in the cultural imaginary. 39 While some real-world stolen children have begun to discover—through DNA testing, scarce records, and luck—who their families were, in many cases the discovery has come too late. 40 This sense of injustice is echoed in the words of El orfanato’s Laura, who finally finds her son Simón in the orphanage basement, but does not arrive in time to find him alive. Clutching his lifeless body in her arms, she cries: “¡te encontré, no es justo!” 41 [I found you, it’s not fair!]. Yet without the loss of Simón, the deaths of the other children never would have come to light, and in this sense Laura’s return to the orphanage of her childhood years has supposed not just a repetition, but also a revelation. The film suggests that Spain too might continue to return to the places that house its phantoms, revealing secrets and breaking the repeated cycle of loss. NOTES 1. Alejandro Amenábar, The Others, directed by Alejandro Amenábar (Jersey, Channel Islands: Miramax, 2001); Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, and David Muñoz, El espinazo del diablo, directed by Guillermo del Toro (Spain; Mexico: Warner Sogefilms AIE; US: Sony Pictures Classics, 2001; Columbia TriStar Entertainment, 2004); Sergio G. Sánchez, El orfanato, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona (Llanes, Oviedo, Asturias, and Barcelona, Spain: New Line Home Video, 2007). 2. Despite the presence in The Others of spectral children, it will not be considered in the present chapter for two reasons. First, while it is often considered within Spanish cinema, its setting outside Spain and in English necessarily makes any reference to Spain and its past more opaque. Second, the film is focalized from the perspective of the ghosts themselves, who do not realize they are dead until the end of the film. 3. José Colmeiro, “Nation of Ghosts? Haunting, Historical Memory and Forgetting in PostFranco Spain,” 452°F: Electronic journal of theory of literature and comparative literature 4 (January 2011): 31, http://www.452f.com/en/josecolmeiro.html (accessed May 17, 2013). Colmeiro does not pursue this idea further in the article, likely for reasons of scope. 4. The theme of “niños robados,” illegally adopted or sold during and after Francoism, is recurrent in the Spanish press, and one of the institutions frequently cited as having been involved in such trafficking is the Casa Cuna Santa Isabel in Valencia. See, for example, Santiago Roncagliolo, “Niños robados,” El País, June 30, 2013, n.p., http://elpais.com/elpais/ 2013/06/27/eps/1372336671_052192.html (accessed November 20, 2014). 5. Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’),” New Literary History 7, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 543.

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6. Sánchez, El orfanato. 7. Del Toro, Trashorras, and Muñoz, El espinazo del diablo. 8. Sánchez, El orfanato. 9. Roger Luckhurst, “‘Something Tremendous, Something Elemental’: On the Ghostly Origins of Psychoanalysis,” in Ghosts: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, History, ed. Peter Buse and Andrew Stott (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1999), 52. 10. Colmeiro, “Nation of Ghosts,” 31. 11. It is also worth noting that the oven in the orphanage kitchen outbuilding where Santi often appears closely resembles the coal shed in El orfanato where Laura eventually disinters the hidden remains of her orphanage companions. 12. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, ed. Adam Phillips, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 147. 13. Del Toro, Trashorras, and Muñoz, El espinazo del diablo. 14. See Jo Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficult of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 89–116. 15. Labanyi, “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain,” 111. 16. Sánchez, El orfanato. 17. In this sense, El espinazo del diablo is a much more standard ghost narrative: once the boys figure out what Santi requires and help him achieve it, they leave him and the orphanage behind, departing from the site of violence into a presumably hostile outside world in the midst of war. 18. Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 79. 19. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 23. 20. Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9. 21. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed., trans., and introduction by Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 171. 22. Esther Rashkin, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2008), 95; emphasis in the original. 23. On the other hand, we could read Laura’s puzzling forgetting of the child Tomás as a paradox or inconsistency in the very story El orfanato narrates. Such a gap or omission points to the troubling and imprecise nature of memory—not only on a personal, but also national, level—particularly powerful in the context of Spain’s ongoing debates about historical memory and the national past. 24. Abraham and Torok distinguish between Freud’s repressed subject and the ghost; in life Tomás is very literally a repressed subject, hidden from view and denied an active or full participation in the community of children at the orphanage. 25. Davis, Haunted Subjects, 11, quoting Abraham and Torok’s L’ecorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 452. 26. Sánchez, El orfanato. 27. Sánchez, El orfanato. 28. Sánchez, El orfanato. 29. Sánchez, El orfanato. 30. Vincenç Navarro, “Los niños perdidos del franquismo,” El País, December 24, 2008, 27, http://elpais.com/diario/2008/12/24/opinion/1230073210_850215.html (accessed July 6, 2015). 31. Ricard Vinyes, Montse Armengou, and Ricard Belis, Los niños perdidos del franquismo (Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2003), 57. 32. Vinyes, Armengou, and Belis, Los niños perdidos, 60. 33. Vinyes, Armengou, and Belis, Los niños perdidos, 59–60. 34. Vinyes, Armengou, and Belis, Los niños perdidos, 60–61; emphasis in the original.

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35. It is worth noting that most of Laura’s time at the orphanage was during the dictatorship: a newsclipping about Tomás’s death is dated 1976, one year after Franco’s death. 36. Àlex Gubern, “Almodóvar comenzará en junio el rodaje de ‘Hable con ella;’ El próximo viernes se estrena ‘El espinazo del diablo,’ de Guillermo del Toro,” ABC, April 18, 2001, 73, http://hemeroteca.abc.es/nav/Navigate.exe/hemeroteca/madrid/abc/2001/04/18/073.html (accessed June 2, 2013). 37. Rashkin, Unspeakable Secrets, 98. 38. On El orfanto and mass graves, see Colmeiro, “Nation of Ghosts,” and María Delgado, “The Young and the Damned: Review of El orfanato,” review of El orfanato, Sight and Sound, April 2008, http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/4275 (accessed November 20, 2014). Colmeiro also cites also M. Natalia Andrés del Pozo’s article “Dealing with an Uncomfortable Relative: The Silent Mass Graves in The Orphanage,” More than Thought (Fall 2010): 1–14. Unfortunately, the link appears to have been deactivated and the article could not be accessed for the current study. Paul Julian Smith analyzes two films of missing children that emerged in the same year period, El orfanato and the art-house film La soledad (Jaime Rosales, 2007). Smith enumerates a number of news stories in the press of the time relating to the “loss, abandonment, and trafficking of children,” though most took place outside Spain’s borders, and those stories dealing with Spain that he mentions are mostly contemporary and unrelated to the postwar (Spanish Practices: Literature, Cinema, Television [London: Legenda, Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2012], 70). What he calls “the heightened contemporary awareness of the actual plight of missing, dead, or displaced children, abroad as in Spain” is indeed another force we could consider underlying the films discussed here (Spanish Practices, 71). Sarah Wright’s The Child in Spanish Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), published subsequently to the writing of this chapter, also connects El laberinto del fauno, El orfanato, and El espinazo del diablo as “films that are seen to gesture toward the imaginary creation of a missing child,” influenced by their precursor El espíritu de la colmena (Child in Spanish Cinema, 17). Later in the text Wright notes that the missing child trope in films has “gained urgency in the news of late as stories of missing children under Francoism emerge in the mass media as the embodiment of a lost national historical memory” (Child in Spanish Cinema, 94), and that Abraham and Torok provide a productive alternative theory of haunting. Alison Ribeiro de Menezes’ recent Emobodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), also published after this chapter’s writing, deploys Abraham and Torok’s framework for a different examination of El espinazo del Diablo alongside del Toro’s more recent El laberinto del fauno (and treats Paracuellos as well), focusing on the “contrast between trauma, on the one hand, and resistance and resilience, on the other, highlight[ing] divergences between contemporary transnational, as compared to national, approaches to war memory” (Ribeiro de Menzes, 88). 39. For example, Sor María Gómez Valbuena, accused of stealing babies in the late 1970s and 1980s, and new evidence of babies purchased from Moroccan mothers. Sor María died in January of 2013 before such cases could be brought to trial; see Natalia Junquera, “Recé para que no muriera; quería verla derrumbarse y confesar,” El País, January 24, 2013, n. p., http:// sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2013/01/24/actualidad/1359013050_505509.html (accessed November 20, 2014). 40. Such cases are becoming increasingly common and are easily found in the Spanish press. See, for example, the case of Ana Isabel A. P., a forty-four year-old woman who found her biological family through DNA testing; her mother had been told that her baby died. See Junquera, “Una supuesta niña robada encuentra a su madre 44 años después,” El País, May 27, 2013, n.p., http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2013/05/27/actualidad/1369687036_708146. html (accessed November 20, 2014). 41. Sánchez, El orfanato.

Chapter Seven

Fog Instead of Land Spectral Topographies of Disappearance in Colombia’s Recent Literature and Film Juliana Martínez

Over the last thirty years Colombia has experienced severe violence, in part as a result of the expansion of powerful drug cartels that spread terror, infiltrated the economy, reshaped the social landscape, and added fuel to the decades-old conflict between guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries, and the army. In connection with its catastrophic human consequences, the conflict has produced, since the mid-1980s, a proliferation of narratives that attempt to stabilize and restore meaning and value to the physical and symbolic space of the Colombian nation. This cultural production is uneven in quality, diverse in perspective and technique, and controversial in nature. 1 Yet, the ubiquity and indisputable commercial success of books, films, and soap-operas that address this topic show that violence is still the most popular and profitable venture in Colombia’s cultural market. Within such a broad and heterogeneous sample, I am interested in two novels and two films that provide a stark and valuable contrast with the majority of narratives authored during this time frame. Following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s pivotal articulation of space and Jacques Derrida’s postulates on the specter, I examine how Evelio Rosero’s En el lejero (2003) and Los ejércitos (2006), Jaime Osorio’s El páramo (2011), and William Vega’s La sirga (2012) challenge the way in which the conflict has been portrayed in Colombia. 2 I propose that by focusing on the physical and symbolic vanishings that violence (re)produces, Evelio Rosero, Jaime Osorio, and William Vega move away from what Derrida calls “ontopology” 3 and explore representational practices that are not satisfied with transcribing ghastly events but that rather refuse to 117

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echo the discourses that fuel the conflict. Like Colombia itself, these works are spaces haunted by the uncertainty and unrest that violence (re)produces, and, as I show, they advance and embody a “spectral spatiality” that encourages novel ways of thinking about Colombia’s recent history. The tension between representation, violence, and the political is neither limited to Colombia nor new. As María Helena Rueda points out in La violencia y sus huellas, violence has been at the heart of cultural production in Colombia for most of the twentieth century, and questions about the ethical implications of its aesthetic representation have haunted writers, filmmakers, and artists for years. 4 In the first chapter of her book, Rueda argues that this dilemma was succinctly articulated in an open letter that José Eustasio Rivera, the author of La vorágine (1924), wrote in response to a harsh critique of his novel. Tormented by the reception of his novel, Rivera wrote: “Dios sabe que al componer mi libro no obedecí a otro móvil que el de buscar la redención de esos infelices que tienen la selva por cárcel. Sin embargo, lejos de conseguirlo, les agravé la situación, pues sólo he logrado hacer mitológicos sus padecimientos y novelescas las torturas que los aniquilan” 5 [God knows that when I composed my book my only goal was to seek redemption for the ill-fated people that have the jungle as their prison. However, instead of achieving my objective, I have aggravated their situation because all I could do was make their suffering mythic and turn into a novel the pain that annihilates them]. Years later, in the midst of the excitement originated by the New Latin-American film, seminal texts like Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969) and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s “Towards a Third Cinema” (1970) grappled with the same urgency of denouncing Latin America’s social problems while at the same time questioning whether the emphasis on the continent’s misery reinforced the preconceptions that first-world viewers had about Latin America and profited from the exhibition of poverty and injustice. 6 Glauber Rocha accurately expressed this concern. In his influential “The Aesthetics of Hunger” (1965), he writes: “Thus, while Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign onlooker cultivates the taste of that misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as an aesthetic object within his field of interest.” And later he adds “the formal exoticism . . . vulgarizes social problems [and] provoke[s] a series of misunderstandings that involve not only art but also politics.” 7 In Colombia, filmmakers Carlos Mayolo and Luis Ospina coined the term “pornomiseria” “to articulate a problem that became endemic to Colombian filmmaking in the 1970s but that continues to haunt any discussion . . . about the representation of socio-economic hardship” 8 and—I would add—violence. As many filmmakers and critics of their time, Mayolo and Ospina were keenly aware that there is a thin line between denunciation and exploitation, and that the desire to represent marginality and violence “always carries the risk of producing the opposite effect: that of a cynical indifference

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which comes from a saturation and fetishisation of this visibility in the absence of proper analysis or even a basic code of ethics.” 9 Hence, for Mayolo and Ospina the most harmful movies and texts are not the ones that avoid social issues altogether, or those that pander to an “excruciatingly trite nationalism.” 10 The most detrimental are the ones that engage in a pseudodenunciation of social injustice, since they are “guilty of the worst kind of exploitation, one that justifies its ambiguous intentions in a distorted and vulgar version of the call for cinematic realism.” 11 Though always intertwined, in the 1990s, the focus had changed from poverty to violence. But Mayolo and Ospina’s critique still stands and proves productive when thinking about the literary and cinematographic production of the last thirty years. If in literature we can talk about a “sicaresca,” 12 in film we could perhaps play with Mayolo and Ospina’s term and talk about porno-violencia, that is to say, the “tendency to turn violence into spectacle.” 13 The term is particularly apt since it brings to the forefront the problematic relation between visuality, exploitation, and pleasure. I will not take the analogy too far, but it does highlight that, despite the meaningful differences between many of the narratives produced in the last thirty years, there is a common reliance on visibility and clarification and a strong sense of pleasure—both sexual and epistemic—associated with it. I am mindful of the fact that there are few similarities between Laura Restrepo’s La Multitud errante and Jorge Franco Ramos’s Rosario Tijeras. However, like the most representative cinematographic and literary narratives of this trend, these two works are display apparatuses: they are structurally sustained and driven by an intense scopophilic desire. As Peter Brooks explains in Body Work, there is a strong correlation between vision, knowledge, and mastery. 14 The desire to see overlaps with the desire to comprehend and to apprehend. The desire to possess and to control, which Brooks calls scopophilic drive, is at the heart of the desire to see. This drive is key for the vast majority of narratives that deal with violence in Colombia, because they equate visibility with epistemic clarity, and knowledge with dominion. In the 1980s Colombia suffered extreme political and social upheaval due to the rise of powerful drug cartels and the growing conflict between the military, the guerrillas, and right-wing paramilitaries. Violence moved from the countryside to the medium and large cities causing panic in the general public and threatening a social elite that had not suffered the most violent consequences of the war. Furthermore, the immense sums of money produced by the lucrative drug trade invigorated the local economy at a time when it was undergoing a severe crisis due, in part, to the aggressive neoliberal reforms that characterized the decade in the region. This influx of money helped ailing private and public finances, but also shook up the traditional class system, as powerful families became dependent on capital of dubious

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origins brought about by newcomers with no social credentials. The ruling class saw itself physically, economically, and even socially threatened as the nouveaux riches started to buy their way into their traditional bastions like social clubs and private schools. In this anxiety-ridden context, literature and film became valuable means to express the uneasiness that characterized the period, as well as powerful devices for mobilizing fantasies of control. Though not always, in many cases filmmakers, audiences, readers, and writers compensated with symbolic mastery the lack of control they felt toward a world increasingly obscure and threatening. In a society that was perceived as menacing and incomprehensible, the clarifying voice of the narrator could re-establish boundaries and create a sense of order and rationality. 15 Consequently, a key element of many of the texts produced during this period is that, in spite of the complex and dismal stories they portray, the space inhabited and produced by the narrative voices remains physically and symbolically unaffected by the violence, while the lives they expose experience the full impact of war. As a result, despite the intense erotic desire that has made many of these novels and films popular, the most powerful drive here is the desire to present to like-minded readers/viewers a reality that is perceived as chaotic and irrational in an intelligible and organized way. In order to do this, these novels and films rely on a scopophilic gaze. They show the control they have over the tragic and violent life stories and bodies of the protagonists by placing a strong emphasis on explanations and descriptions. By thoroughly explaining historic and linguistic references the reader might not be familiar with, as well as by providing detailed and erotically charged descriptions of the characters, both novels and films invite their audiences to enjoy and to be seduced by their exhibition(ism). However, this reliance on scopophilic desire is problematic because it mobilizes a distanced, exploitative, patronizing, and self-serving perspective of the Colombian conflict. As Mayolo and Ospina denounced years ago, the very framework of these narratives upholds the hierarchical structures of discrimination and exploitation that (re)produces the violence they are supposed to be denouncing, and profit from it. In this context the words of Juana Suárez in Cinembargo Colombia seem even more pressing: “Si el tema más frecuente del cine [y la novela] colombiano[s] sigue siendo la violencia, cabe indagar si hay un cambio de encuadre y otro lente de acercamiento al mismo . . . en el centro del dilema, entonces, subsiste la discusión sobre mirar la violencia, ser indiferentes o encontrar otra manera de abordarla” 16 [If violence is still the most common topic in Colombia’s film (and novel), we need to ask ourselves whether there is a change in the frame and whether there is a new lens to approach (violence). . . . At the heart of the issue remains the debate about whether to look at the violence, be indifferent to it, or find a another way to approach it].

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This search for a different frame from where to look at violence is what María Helena Rueda has called “ética ansiosa” 17 [anxious ethics]. That is to say, the different aesthetic practices filmmakers, writers, and artists use in an effort to represent historical violence without aggravating it or oversimplifying it for commercial purposes. This ethical anxiety seems to haunt Evelio Rosero, William Vega, and Jaime Osorio and their works can be seen as innovative and productive contributions to this dilemma. En el lejero, Los ejércitos, El páramo, and La sirga are novels and films that explore how the ways in which we talk about violence are often in themselves part of that violence; they are a keen exploration of the “imbricación de la violencia con [los] sistemas de representación” 18 [imbrication of violence with systems of representation]. This does not mean that these narratives are self-reflexive in a meta-cinematographic/literary way. They do not talk explicitly about literature or film. Narratively speaking, they are quite simple. However, within this apparent narrative simplicity there is a profound “cuestionamiento de su propio modo de representación . . . con miras a la visibilidad o invisibilidad de sus sujetos, involucrando el acto mismo de ver y los modos de ser visto o no visto en una sociedad tan mediatizada por la imagen y el espectáculo” 19 [questioning of their own means of representation . . . with an eye toward the visibility or invisibility of their subjects, including the very act of seeing and the means by which one is seen or not seen in a society so influenced by image and spectacle]. Both films and movies talk about people haunted by war, trying to find themselves and others in the midst of its chaos and confusion. In En el lejero (2003) and Los ejércitos (2006) novelist Evelio Rosero narrates the story of disoriented old men, Jeremías Andrade and Ismael Pasos respectively, who are looking for a loved one that has disappeared due to the war. Jeremías goes from town to town carrying around an old photograph of his granddaughter, and Ismael wanders in his native San José desperately searching for his wife Otilia who has vanished after an unidentified army took control of the village. La sirga (2012), directed by William Vega, narrates the story of Alicia, a young woman who arrives at a ramshackle hostel owned by Óscar, her uncle and last living family member. An unspecified army has burnt down Alicia’s hometown and she is looking for a sense of warmth and belonging in the cold and desolate landscape of La Cocha. Written and directed by Jaime Osorio Márquez, El páramo tells the story of an isolated and terrified squad of soldiers trying to find their fellow army men and make sense of their mission and surroundings. The fact that in these narratives everyone is in an ongoing search for those who have disappeared is important. Instead of focusing on the display and spectacle of war, these narratives tackle the conundrum that violence—with its constant threat and very real capacity to make everything vanish—poses to systems of representation. They prioritize that which can no longer be seen but lingers, the strength and reality of what has disappeared. It seems as

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though Rosero, Vega, and Osorio ask themselves the same question that Diana Taylor poses about the thousands of desaparecidos [disappeared] during Argentina’s Dirty War: “How to think about these bodies that we know exist(ed) but that have vanished into thin air? And how to think about those vanishings?” 20 They are keenly aware that what such vanishings demand is not only symbolic representation and compensation, but also a profound review of the structures that make such disappearances possible. In En el lejero, Los ejércitos, El páramo, and La sirga such revision is literal. The physical disappearance of bodies is not only their thematic preoccupation; it constitutes the narrative space itself. Like Colombia, these films and novels are spaces haunted by the presence of those who are no longer there but refuse to vanish entirely. As a result, a key component of these narratives is a profound distrust of visibility and elucidation. They do not present, transcribe, or explain. On the contrary, to see in En el lejero, Los ejércitos, El páramo, and La sirga is always to witness something, or someone, disappear. Clarity is one of the first things to vanish with the arrival of the invisible—and therefore even more efficient—army in Los ejércitos. 21 “Viéndolos realmente es como si todos se encontraran anegados en niebla” 22 [Seeing them really is as if they were all flooded in fog], 23 says Ismael, and this statement could be said to set the tone for the way visibility is (de)constructed in the text. The novel abounds in references to fog, smog, blurriness, and chaos; and the old school master constantly emphasizes his inability to see and to recognize things, people, and places. Seeing, in this instance, is a difficult, painful, and frustrating task. As Ismael says, in Rosero’s world our eyes are in pain 24 and should not be trusted. 25 A direct consequence of the inability to see and to recognize is that both Ismael and the reader lose the capacity to navigate the space. Sentences like “no puedo reconocer el pueblo” 26 [I cannot recognize the town] 27 or “¿estoy frente a la puerta de mi casa?, es mi casa, creo . . . acabo de entrar, sólo para comprobar que no es mi casa,” 28 [Am I in front of my own house? It is my house, I think . . . I have just gone in, only to discover that it is not my house]. 29 are a constant reminder that even the most basic trajectories are fraught with bewilderment and anguish. Furthermore, in the second part of the novel, all the references to days and time are accompanied by either a question mark or an expression of doubt. This gesture reaches its peak in chapter 17, where all the sections start with a day of the week followed by a question mark; by the end of the novel we have given up on establishing a timeline and have to agree with Ismael: “no era posible adivinar qué horas eran” 30 [It was not possible to guess what time it was]. 31 In En el lejero the situation is even more extreme. Throughout the novel, Jeremías struggles to make sense of the ambiguous and disorienting space he inhabits. The constant presence of darkness, smoke, and fog impedes vision. For both readers and protagonists the spaces are unfamiliar and there is a

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strong sense of vulnerability and menace. Voices are silenced or turned into intelligible murmurs. Things, spatial referents, and people are blurred by darkness and bafflement; they unpredictably disappear behind threats of mist, smoke, or madness only to reappear later: “[N]o se veía a nadie, no se podía ver. . . . Hubo un silencio, otro denso trozo de niebla pareció separarlos para siempre . . . pero al segundo las caras reaparecieron, los ojos, los cuerpos borrosos detrás de la fina llovizna.” 32 [You couldn’t see anybody, you couldn’t see. . . . There was silence, another thick slice of fog seemed to separate them forever . . . but a second later the faces reappeared, the eyes, the blurry bodies behind the thin drizzle]. This uncertainty is also epistemological, both seeing and knowing are extremely difficult tasks in these narratives. By the end of both the novels and the films, many questions remain answered. Who attacked Alicia’s town in La sirga, why did they do it? Where is she going next? What happened to Jeremías’s granddaughter? Why was she held hostage? Why were the people of the town seemingly so aggressive with the old man and why then, do they help him in the end? What’s going to happen to Ismael all alone in San José? Where is his wife Otilia? Who took her and why? Was it really a witch that killed the soldiers in El páramo? What happened in that military base, why are all the soldiers dead? Does the last solider survive? We do not know and this not-knowing is meaningful. In En el lejero, Los ejércitos, El páramo, and La sirga specific geographical referents are either completely elided or vaguely mentioned. From their titles, these narratives emphasize a key spatial ambiguity. We do not know the name or location of the town through which Jeremías wanders; we only know that it is “very far away,” a “lejero.” 33 El páramo loses this ambiguity when translated into English as The Squad, the military term replaces the geographical referent eliminating the connotations of cold, isolation, fog, lack of visibility, and difficulty of breathing that the Spanish word “páramo” carries with it and that are so important in the movie. “La Cocha”—Colombia’s second largest lake—is only tangentially mentioned in La sirga. At nine-thousand feet, it is located in the south, in the midst of some of the most violent areas of the country. However, we do not know any of this; the specificity of the place is neither explained nor thematized. Only the isolation and the scarcity of the site seem to be of importance for the narrative. Finally, by naming his novel simply Los ejércitos, Rosero disregards the rhetoric and political differences between the agents of violence. Acronyms like AUC, ELN, or FARC 34 are never mentioned in the novel. Instead of trying to identify or side with a particular army, he focuses in the horrific impact of their actions on the civilian population. Thus, these narratives do not attempt to dispel the fog of war; they are narrated from within it. They portray the “crisis in looking” 35 that violence brings with it, and turn visuality “from a transparent tool into a felt uncertain-

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ty.” 36 Shock and bewilderment, not clarity and seduction, define the experience of reading these novels and watching these films. As María Helena Rueda says in an article that analyzes pictures made by Colombian ex-combatants: While looking at these images, the spectator has no way to know what originated the act of aggression they portray, or to identify the people involved in them . . . he or she is left in a state of bewilderment, where the desire to obtain more specific information on the workings of the war in Colombia is left in suspense. It is a way in which the blank spaces . . . add to the horror of what their images portray. 37

By focusing on the physical and symbolic vanishings that violence (re)produces, these texts move away from what Derrida calls the “ontopology” of presence, that is “an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of the present-being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.” 38 Instead, these texts advance an anti-essentialist, unstable, spectral, notion of space from which alternative and less violent aesthetic spaces of representation can emerge. In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari explain that there are two kinds of sites: striated and smooth spaces. Striated spaces are “defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance, . . . constitution of a central perspective”; 39 consequently, they prioritize and rely on the scopic regime. Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the scopic regime closely relates to Brook’s scopophilic impulse in that they both understand perspectivist vision as a device of control and mastery. Therefore, “one of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns.” 40 For a nation it is key to (re)produce a space that is measurable, that has defined boundaries, that can be perceived clearly—in maps, aerial photographs, and such—and that has well-defined geographic and historical landmarks that remain stable through the years. On the other hand, smooth spaces move away from vision and rely instead in what Deleuze and Guattari call haptic perception: “[W]here there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather, the eye itself has a haptic, nonoptical function: no line separates earth form sky, which are of the same substance; there is neither horizon nor background nor perspective nor limit nor outline or form nor center.” 41 Striated spaces are part of the ontopology of presence: smooth spaces, on the contrary, are anti-essentialist, unstable sites. In En el lejero, Los ejércitos, El páramo, and La sirga the space is smooth. The strategies that both characters and readers/viewers would traditionally use to map and striate the terrain are made obsolete. Ismael gets lost in his own hometown and he is unable to make his way back to his house; Jeremías is terrified and disconcerted as he wanders looking for his grand-

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daughter; no one seems capable of fully apprehending the space in La sirga; and the soldiers in El páramo are until the end unable to make their way through the midst and the darkness that surrounds them. This impossibility of navigating, mapping, and dominating the symbolic and physical spaces is made particularly evident in El páramo. All the maps in the movie are ineffective, their topographical abstractions prove useless when dealing with smooth spaces; they do not help the protagonists find their location or give them any valuable strategic information. This inability to “read” the space causes the soldiers to fail in their efforts of controlling and “securing” the territory. Moreover, the violence implicit in such endeavours is made manifest by the constant presence of blood in all the surfaces that attempt to provide stability and control to personal and national identities: the walls of the base, the maps, and the mirrors are all covered in blood. In all four narratives it is impossible for characters and readers to stay grounded. Instability, disorientation, and opaqueness are the coordinates of these spectral topographies of disappearance. The substrate upon which stability itself depends literally vanishes into thin air and turns into darkness, water, “niebla en lugar de tierra” [fog instead of land]. 42 Another element that these narratives have in common is that—like in all smooth spaces—boundaries remain porous and uncertain. In Los ejércitos the walls literally come down with the impact of the mortars, in En el lejero and La sirga the flimsy walls allow rain, cold, and looks to seep through them, and in El páramo the old base fails to give the soldiers a sense of comfort and protection. In all four cases, readers/viewers are presented with narratives where the conceptual and physical space remains open, flighty, unstable, and disorienting. This is not positive or negative per se. In fact, smooth spaces can also be destructive and violent. As Deleuze and Guattari caution: “never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us.” 43 This adverse quality is present in both the novels and the films but it is particularly abrasive in El páramo. 44 Out of the four narratives being discussed here, this is the only one where all the characters—except the woman—are active agents in the conflict. Immersed in the discourses of war, the soldiers are unable to go beyond the divisions that fuel and uphold violence. They insist in labelling people as “guerrilleros,” “terrorists,” and even “witches,” and in classifying them according to race, class, and gender. 45 The consequences are fatal: haunted by guilt, prejudices, and fear, they end up (re)producing the dynamics and discourses of the conflict and are unable to create a space of solidarity and understanding. They end up killing each other; darkness, fog, and madness swallow them. In En el lejero, Los ejércitos, and La sirga the situation is different. Despite the fear and disorientation that all the characters feel, they slowly learn to entrust themselves to the pace and the ambiguity of the fog, and are finally able to find hope, solidarity, strength, and courage. These narratives

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invite readers/viewers to follow Jeremías’s lead and learn to see, inhabit, and recognize each other not despite the fog, but through it: “[É]l buscaba en la rara luz de la niebla, como si sólo así pudiera encontrar la respuesta por fin, al fin el fin de su búsqueda. Los sobrecogía esa vista sin perspectiva” 46 [he searched in the strange light of the fog, as if only in this way he would be able to find the answer at last, at long last of the end of the search. They were overcome by that view with no perspective]. Sofía Oggioni—cinematographer of La sirga—expresses herself in similar terms when talking about her aesthetic decisions and about filming in La Cocha. For her, fog and darkness are not impediments; on the contrary, they are new ways of looking, ripe with possibilities: mirar a través de la niebla es como mirar en desenfoco . . . la bruma es quien dosifica la información de lo que se ve. Es selectiva y por eso sólo nos muestra lo que conviene que veamos [la niebla es] como la metáfora de personajes con motivaciones aparentemente confusas que se transforman en su travesía, en ese encuentro con su mundo interior, uno nublado y confuso, marcado por el miedo, el temor por aquello que esconde ese velo vaporoso. 47 [Seeing through the fog is like looking (through a lens that is) out of focus. . . . The mist gives visual information in dribs and drabs. It is selective and that is why it only shows us what is best for us to see. (Fog) is a metaphor for characters with motivations that are unclear and who transform themselves in their journey—in that encounter with their inner world, one that is hazy and confusing, marked by fear, fear of what the misty veil hides.]

As La Sirga’s subtitle suggests, “aquí dejo mi miedo,” these narratives are all about “letting go of one’s fear,” about daring to inhabit a space that’s not transversed by the visual and epistemic coordinates of control and dominion. This anti-essentialist, de-territorialized, and haptic notion of space hopes to take into account the many vanishings that haunt Colombia, and to help us think about how these disappearances make Colombia a country of ghosts, a spectral country. In Specters of Marx, Derrida stresses the political importance of the specter. In a world that after the fall of the Berlin Wall claims to have found a unique system of producing and measuring time, meanings, and goods, Derrida underscores the need to recognize and converse with specters. He argues that we need to move away from ontopology—because of its emphasis in presence and stability—and toward a “hauntology.” Specters, Derrida says, cannot be thought of from the logics of presence and the present because they are precisely what has been conceptually and physically banished from existence. The disappearance of people as a historical phenomenon that all four narratives incorporate into their narrative fabric problematizes the ontology of presence and present. These narratives assume the aporia that these van-

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ishings present to social, political, literary, and legal representation systems, and by refusing to equate invisibility with non-existence, silence with lack of stories, they dare explore complex and unacknowledged crises that a prolonged state of violence (re)produces in the daily lives of the people who endure it. In this context, the Derridean notion of hauntology allows one to think the visual dynamics in En el lejero, Los ejércitos, and La sirga as more than a movement toward dispossession and invisibility. For Rosero, Vega, and Osorio the existence and relevance of what cannot be seen, identified or explained must be acknowledged. The difficulty of seeing undermines the privilege of readers and viewers and forces them to engage more actively and critically with vision. Moreover, by mobilizing the ambiguous, hazy and open-ended aesthetic of the spectral they refuse to ratify the divisive classifications that structure society. Instead, Rosero, Vega, and Osorio emphasize the complexity, ambiguity, and intricateness innate to all human interactions but particularly to those where being—both in a symbolic and in a very physical, real, sense—is constantly at stake. In this sense, these films and novels answer the call that Kaja Silverman makes at the end of The Threshold of the Visible World. Throughout her book, Silverman advocates for a change in ways of seeing and longs for “the possibility of a productive vision, of an eye capable of seeing something other than what is given to be seen.” 48 Despite the extensive account that she makes of the many dangers of vision, Silverman concludes with a call to those who seek to construct new meanings: “help us to see differently,” says Silverman. 49 Rosero, Osorio, and Vega listen. They produce a way of seeing that stirs away from scopophilic desire and its triangulation of sight, knowledge, and power; and open a space where sense is rethought through a reworking of the senses and the displacement of the desire to clarify and classify. Is this not what both films and novels propose in different ways? Jeremías finds solidarity in the town and finally gets his granddaughter back, he teaches to not give up and to trust others precisely when this seems more difficult and frighting; and, in the words of Vega, Alicia is “a metaphor for new beginnings, for the possibility of starting over.” Only the soldiers of El páramo are unable to escape the discursivity of war and remain trapped in its violent spiral. But perhaps the most valuable lesson comes from the old teacher, Ismael. As he wanders San José in search of Otilia and his home, Ismael learns a new way of inhabiting and communicating: He perdido la memoria, igual que si me hundiera y empezara a bajar uno por uno los peldaños que conducen a lo más desconocido, este pueblo, quedaré solo, supongo, pero de cualquier manera haré de este pueblo mi casa, y pasearé por ti, pueblo, hasta que llegue Otilia por mí.

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Confronted with a ghost town, Ismael acknowledges the vacancy left by the loss of a community founded on certain tenets. He moves away from a way of making sense that is based on presence, visibility, and rational explanation and conjures the spectral experience against oblivion and despair. He does not disavow the permanence of those who are no-longer-not-yetthere; 52 instead, he welcomes the possibility of creating new solidarities, narratives, and ways of being from within this spectral landscape. This is what these narratives mobilize: an alternate way of seeing that does not allow distance from the violence that is displayed, or for enjoyment to be derived from it. They exemplify Mieke Bal’s formulations on politically pertinent works of art in that they protest, reminisce, deplore, reenact, and exorcise, but never redeem the rule of violence. 53 There is no porno-violencia here; violence is not experienced from a safe, aerial, and omniscient perspective; and the reader/viewer cannot be seduced by its spectacle. On the contrary, to navigate these narratives the reader/viewer has to follow Ismael’s footsteps and—like him—learn to listen to the spectral murmur. In this sense Rosero, Osorio, and Vega are exorcists: men who deal with specters, who know how to conjure them. The difference is that once they have arrived they do not expel them. These novels and films are haunted spaces where Derrida’s “impure impure history of ghosts” 54 is the only way of narrating a reality that has to account for the many disappearances, appearances, and reappearances that constitute it. Art and literature can be powerful artifacts. As Rosero often says, 55 they have the ability to make people uncomfortable, to confront and shake them. They help people reflect on society, opening the possibility that they might act upon that resulting thought; they help see and hear that which is no longer there, that which cannot speak anymore; they are proof, as Bal says, that “in the face of disaster, violence, and terror, in the presence of enduring war, hence as in the present, [these works] show that art is a worthy—even indispensable—contribution to the collective efforts toward making societies livable.” 56

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NOTES 1. Antonio Caballero, Sin remedio (Bogotá: Oveja Negra, 1984); Mario Bahamón Dussán, El sicario (Cali, Colombia: Orquidea, 1988); Laura Restrepo, Leopardo al sol (Bogotá: Planeta Colombiana, 1993); Restrepo, La multitud errante (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2003); Restrepo, Delirio (Bogotá: Alfaguara, 2004); Fernando Vallejo, La virgen de los sicarios (Santa Fe de Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1994); Darío Jaramillo Agudelo, Cartas cruzadas (Bogotá: Alfaguara, 1995); Óscar Collazos, Morir con papá (Bogotá: Seix Barral, 1997); Collazos, Rencor (Bogotá: Planeta, 2006); Jorge Franco Ramos, Rosario Tijeras (Bogotá: Plaza & Janés, 1999); Arturo Alape, Sangre ajena (Bogotá: Seix Barral, 2000); Antonio Ungar, Tres ataúdes blancos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 2010); and Juan Gabriel Vásquez, El ruido de las cosas al caer (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2011) are some of the best-known novels. Víctor Gaviria, Rodrigo D: no future, directed by Victor Gaviria, DVD (Colombia: Compañía de Fomento Cinematográfico, 1990); Víctor Gaviria and Carlos Henao, La vendedora de rosas, directed by Victor Gaviria, DVD (Medellín, Colombia: Venevisión, 1998); Fernando Vallejo, La virgen de los sicarios, directed by Barbet Schroeder, DVD (Medellín, Colombia: Paramount, 2000); Jorge Franco Ramos and Marcelo Figueras, Rosario Tijeras, directed by Emilio Maillé, DVD (Medellín, Colombia: First Look Home Entertainment, 2005); and Scott Dalton and Margarita Martínez, La sierra, directed by Scott Dalton and Margarita Martínez, DVD (Medellín, Colombia: First Run Films, 2004) are the more recognizable films. More recently, “narco-telenovelas” like El cartel de los sapos, Sin tetas no hay paraíso, El patrón del mal, and Los tres caínes have produced a heated controversy while making millions in profit. 2. Evelio Rosero, En el lejero (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2003; 2007); Rosero, Los ejércitos (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2007); Jaime Osorio Márquez, Tania Cardenas, and Márquez Diego Vivanco, El páramo, directed by Jaime Osorio Márquez, DVD (Parque de los Nevados, Colombia: Rayuela Films, 2011; Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012); and William Vega, La sirga, directed by William Vega, DVD (La Cocha, Colombia: Contravía Films and Punto Guión Punto Producciones, 2012). 3. Specters (1994), 102. 4. María Helena Rueda, La violencia y sus huellas: Una mirada desde la narrativa colombiana (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2011). 5. José Eustasio Rivera, La Vorágine, ed. Flor María Rodríguez-Arenas (Doral, FL: Stockcero, 2013), lxxxviii. 6. Julio García Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema” (1969), trans. Julianne Burton. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 20 (1979): 24–26, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ onlinessays/JC20folder/ImperfectCinema.html (accessed July 13, 2015); Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema,” Cinéaste 4, no. 3 (Winter 1970): 1–10. 7. Glauber Rocha, “Aesthetic of Hunger,” Cronistas, trans. Randall Johnson and Burnes Hollyman, n.d., http://www.cronistas.org/the-aesthetics-of-hunger/ (accessed May 9, 2013). 8. Michèle Faguet, “Pornomiseria: Or How Not To Make a Documentary Film,” Afterall 21 (Summer 2009): 4. 9. Faguet, “Pornomiseria,” 7. 10. Faguet, “Pornomiseria,” 12. 11. Faguet, “Pornomiseria,” 12. 12. The term is a play of words from the Spanish term “sicario,” which designates the young hit men that became infamous during some of the most violent years of the drug wars in Colombia; and “picaresca,” the word used to the designate the picaresque literary genre. Thus “sicaresca” has been used to signal the emergence of an important number of literary works that deal with this phenomenon. It was coined by the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince in his 1995 article “Estética y narcotráfico,” Revista Número 7 (1995): 6–7. It has its limitations, but it has proven to be very useful to refer to the novels about the lives of these young assassins and, in general, about the violent and exuberant world of the “narcos” that became popular in the late 1980s and are still very well received by the public. Fernando Vallejo’s La virgen de los sicarios is the most canonical example. 13. Juana Suárez, Cinembargo Colombia: Ensayos críticos sobre cine y cultura (Cali, Colombia: Universidad del Valle, Programa Editorial, 2009), 298.

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14. Peter Brooks, Body Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 88. 15. Víctor Gaviria’s movies—most notably Rodrigo D: no future are salient exceptions. 16. Suárez, Cinembargo Colombia, 182. 17. Rueda, La violencia y sus huellas, 182. 18. Geoffrey Kantaris, “El cine urbano y la tercera violencia colombiana,” Revista Iberoamericana 74, no. 223 (April–June 2008): 456. 19. Kantaris, “El cine urbano,” 458. 20. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 140. 21. Rosero, Los ejércitos (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2007), 124. 22. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 85. 23. Evelio Rosero, The Armies, trans. Anne McLean (New York: A New Directions Book, 2009), 77. 24. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 18. 25. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 138. 26. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 189. 27. Rosero, The Armies, 187. 28. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 199. 29. Rosero, The Armies, 195. 30. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 200. 31. Rosero, The Armies, 196. 32. Rosero, En el lejero (2003), 28–29. 33. As Rosero has explained, the title of the book comes from the Spanish word “lejos” which means “far.” Therefore “en el lejero” would mean “in a faraway land.” 34. These are acronyms of some of Colombian’s most notorious armed groups: Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), and Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). 35. Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 114. 36. Baer, Spectral Evidence, 106. 37. María Helena Rueda, “Facing Unseen Violence: Ex-combatants Painting the War in Colombia,” in Meanings of Violence in Contemporary Latin America, ed. Gabriela Polit Dueñas and María Helena Rueda (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011), 67.[AQ2] 38. Specters (1994), 103; emphasis in the original. 39. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2008), 494. 40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 385. 41. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 494. 42. Rosero, En el lejero, 14; “Facing Unseen Violence: Ex-combatants Painting the War in Colombia.” 43. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 500. 44. Even despite the gruesome images of “el perdedero” in En el lejero, the tormented shadows that inhabit it finally lead Jeremías safely to the other side of the abyss and give him his granddaughter without ransom or explanation. 45. “Negro” and “indio” are both used in the film to designate characters, and the only woman in the film is presented as a “witch,” as the responsible of “everything” (“ella tiene la culpa de todo”). Vivanco, El páramo. 46. Rosero, En el lejero, 73. 47. Proimágenes Colombia, “Sofìa Oggioni Hatty,” August 31–September 7, 2012, http:// www.proimagenescolombia.com//secciones/pantalla_colombia/breves_plantilla.php?id_ noticia=4286 (accessed May 9, 2013). 48. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), 227. 49. Silverman, Threshold, 227. 50. Rosero, Los ejércitos, 194. 51. Rosero, The Armies, 191–92. 52. Specters (1994), xvii.

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53. Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak. Doris Salcedo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 27. 54. Specters (1994), 118. 55. Evelio Rosero, talk at the University of California, Berkeley; February 21–24, 2012. 56. Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak, 54; emphasis in the original.

III

Still Images: The Living and the Dead

Death can be found in the origin of photography as a widespread modern, Western documentary practice, in the form of rather secularized rites of mourning and funeral commemoration of the departed. The professional creation, public circulation, and (semi)private consumption of mechanically reproducible images took place in a field defined affectively by ideas of remembrance and, sometimes, irreparable loss. Many of the qualities often associated with photography, such as stillness, memorialization, transparency, or affection were born or reinforced in the portraitures of the dead. Furthermore, and especially among the popular classes, a funeral photograph would often be the only extant visual witness of someone’s passing through Earth. Thus, a complex cultural constellation emerged alongside the origins of photography, in which memory as timeless preservation becomes inextricably linked with the fragility of human life and the material precariousness of negatives and prints. Photography acquires a central role thanks not only to mourners combatting oblivion, but also to forensic and medical professions combatting the death of the body. Public institutions and policies of biological governance as well as state surveillance agencies played a fundamental role in producing and collecting photographic records of the dead. Classification protocols that make possible the creation and control of vast archives of prints coexist with the intense emotional investment of a few individuals in a few remaining photographs of one beloved person. Photography is a distinctly modern practice that lives spectrally in the unbridgeable chasm between presence and disappearance, conservation and loss, biopolitics and mourning, abstraction and individualization.

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While socialization is predicated on the common perceptual experience of movement, in the case of photographic reproduction, one faces the uncanny immobility of a precise, two-dimensional, still replication of a human body. Roland Barthes describes a connection between photography and death when posing that the living subject in the frame undergoes a “micro-version of death” 1 and spectralizes herself when contemplating the observer through the portrait. As a future spectator, the observer recognizes her own mortality in the subject’s absence; the portrait becomes “imperious sign of my [the observer’s] future death.” 2 Additionally, for Barthes, photography underscores the tenuousness of experience of others, because the photographic subject, according to Barthes, is a sum of multiple frozen instants, “a thousand shifting photographs.” 3 In its fragmentariness, stillness, and particularity, the photographic album renders a loved person more accurately, while closeness and familiarity have impressed those who knew the subject with a false, unique image. This proximity is predicated on the disappearance of the dead and of yet-to-come extinction, and the mirage of transparency found in photographs only heightens anxiety in the face of a future that will not include the present or the past. As we contemplate pictures and feel haunted by those preserved in them, we are reminded that the best we can hope for is a future of haunting someone else through the same precarious practice of looking at photographs. In other words, the still non-existent specter comes back from the future to haunt us now. Although many arguments discussed above already figure prominently in image theory and criticism, here we choose to emphasize their more spectral or funeral dimension. For the purposes of this volume we connect the spectral image with the concept of haunting as a presence of that which is absent, as established in the introductory chapter. The chapters by N. Michelle Murray and Marta Sierra account for the ways in which photography can expand its scope to include, appropriate, or revindicate figures traditionally absent or deliberately excluded from hegemonic representations of society. The stark photograph of a dead woman washed ashore a Spanish beach, and its use on the cover of a noir novel dealing with the immigrant experience are the starting point of Murray’s chapter, “Framing and Feeling Immigration: Haunting Visuality and Alterity in Ramito de hierbabuena.” Murray notes that, while the presence of the abused migrant haunts Spanish culture, the narrative treatment of this ghost by the Spanish authorial voice in Ramito de hierbabuena seeks to dominate it through romantic idealization and generic conventions. Murray’s analysis demonstrates how narratives of individualized violence belie and efface collectivized forms of migrant exploitation, and how the migrant’s voice is hollowed out and possessed by the Spanish authorial discourse. In her “Memento Mori: Photography and Narrative in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie Me verá Llorar,” Sierra brings to the fore the usage of photography for the purposes of biopolitical governance and institu-

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tionalization. She investigates the relationship of photographic documentation of marginalized prostitutes during modernization in Mexico to argue that Rivera-Garza reveals and contests (re)iterative “spectral elements of hegemonic narratives.” 4 NOTES 1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 14. 2. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 97. 3. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12, 110. 4. See page 154.

Chapter Eight

Framing and Feeling Immigration Haunting Visuality and Alterity in Ramito de hierbabuena N. Michelle Murray

Since 2010, the platform “A Desalambrar” has placed twenty thousand reed crosses on the Playa de la Herradura in Granada; each cross represents an immigrant who has perished during the dangerous voyage via patera, a rickety fishing boat migrants use to travel from North Africa to southern Spain. This symbolic cemetery aims to pay homage to the “invisible” dead immigrants under the Mediterranean Sea. 1 Also integral to this commemoration is the desire to acknowledge these deaths collectively and produce an affective response to immigration rooted in recognition and solidarity on the Spanish side of the Strait of Gibraltar. 2 This symbol of shared grief counters a nationalist response to immigration seemingly tethered to a ghastly thanatopolitics in which humans considered unworthy of their lives are not only denied legal protections, but also allowed to die within the confines of a neoliberal state and a commodity-driven society that frequently attaches monetary value to human life. Gerardo Muñoz Lorente’s 2003 novel Ramito de hierbabuena similarly shows that immigrant deaths in the Strait of Gibraltar haunt the Spanish collective. The novel features a photograph of a dead immigrant woman on the cover. Her eyes are partially opened, in a gaze of death and horror. One of her arms lies perpendicular to her body; and a tattered blouse exposes her torso and a black, lacy bra. Her forehead is covered with sand and blood. The sea occupies most of the space behind her, yet her bruised, naked body is the object of the photographic gaze. 3 By juxtaposing a photograph of a dead immigrant woman with a narrative that describes her life and death, the novel 137

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shows the reader that an image that circulated in the Spanish press leads the author to interrogate the ways in which dead Maghrebian immigrants function as ghosts that haunt contemporary Spanish culture. However, in contrast to the recognition envisioned by groups like “A Desalambrar,” Ramito de hierbabuena crystallizes around what I contend is a profound misrecognition that exploits the violence to which immigrants are often subjected. While the original 2003 release of Ramito de hierbabuena features the photograph described as the cover art, the novel was reissued in 2010 as Takebitnanaa (ramito de hierbabuena in Arabic) with the photographed corpse no longer appearing on the novel’s front cover. The initial, uncritical publication of both the photograph and the novel in 2003 nevertheless signals a decisive moment in Spanish cultural production and aptly encapsulates the dynamics of suffering, dying, and haunting pivotal to representations of immigration in twenty-first-century Spain. For that reason, the 2003 edition of the novel is the focus of my analysis. Based on the framework provided by spectral criticism, I contend that this novel dramatizes the photograph from a Spanish perspective and thus uncritically appropriates the anonymous woman’s life and death in a gesture that intensifies her violent marginalization. My approach is heavily indebted to Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. 4 For Gordon, the present “is still haunted by the symptomatic traces of its productions and exclusions.” 5 She also notes, If haunting describes how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and meddling with taken-for-granted realities, the ghost is . . . the sign, or the empirical evidence . . . that tells you a haunting is taking place. The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. 6

Indeed, the haunting at work in Ramito de hierbabuena elucidates the ways that an immigrant whose death is not resolved transforms into a ghostly, social figure and resuscitates suppressed, shared histories between Spain and the Maghreb. While the twenty-first-century photograph of the dead immigrant motivates Muñoz Lorente’s writing, his novel simultaneously reveals the vestiges of collective traumas that continue to bear upon individual and collective structures of nationalistic identification and desire. Owing to its usage of photography, Ramito de hierbabuena invites an analysis that melds visual and literary studies to consider the intricacies of representation of immigration in contemporary Spain. 7 Ramito de hierbabuena resonates with earlier Peninsular writers’ hybrid texts that enfold literary and visual elements, such as photography, not only to question what is visible within Spanish culture but also to reformulate and rewrite history. 8

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Numerous studies have theorized photography’s potential as a tool utilized to subvert state power and hegemony in Spain and have argued that creative work like photography can expose fissures in official history. 9 Critics have also contended that photography sustains hegemony. 10 The staging, framing, and shooting integral to photographic representation often presupposes a power differential between those photographed and those on the other side of the lens. In addition, while there is an undeniable increase in images of immigration and these images possess the potential to destabilize and disrupt hegemony, visual culture also faces numerous limitations. Robert Shohat and Ella Stam argue, “The visual . . . is ‘languaged’ . . . [and] is touched by other texts and discourses and imbricated in a whole series of apparatuses.” 11 Similarly, Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones draws on the work of Ariella Azoulay and Jacques Rancière to postulate: “what we see and how we see it have already been politically demarcated.” 12 For even when the scope of vision is enlarged to include marginalized, counter-hegemonic elements, methodologies of seeing are not neutral and remain embedded in cultural systems. Hence, what is seen remains subject to a particular gaze that social actors have been taught to cast upon the world. Walter Benjamin claims that when a viewer sees a personal photograph, “one encounters something strange and new . . . something that is not to be silenced, something demanding the name of the person who had lived then.” 13 Rather than seek information about the anonymous dead woman who appears on the cover of Ramito de hierbabuena, Muñoz Lorente, who states he was attracted by the dead woman’s youth and beauty, opts to create a fictional account that purportedly breathes life into this woman; she is reborn Maimuna Azhar Maymum. Maimuna’s death is tethered to love and violence from the onset of the novel in an unsettling description of the ocean as an eager love that overpowers Maimuna with its desire: “El mar por fin se la confió a la tierra con sus brazos de espuma, si bien continuó abrazandola a breves intervalos, como un amante afligido por el arrepentimiento” 14 [The sea finally entrusted her to the land, with its frothy arms, although it kept embracing her at times, like a regretful lover]. The Mediterranean as oceanic lover unable to restrain itself both prefigures the Spanish men who abuse her and symbolizes a nation and a concomitant world system that—much like the ocean waves—undulate, flowing between acceptance and abjection of immigrants. Hence, from the beginning of Ramito de hierbabuena, despite the novel’s putative objective, realist stance, the narrator signals the affective dynamics of love/abuse and death/haunting that structure the text. The nexus of loss, recognition, and emotional impact vital to photographic representation is also pivotal to the affective investments that frame Ramito de hierbabuena. Philippe Dubois describes photography as thanatography. 15 This term combines death and the psychical consequences of loss as

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intrinsic to photography as genre. 16 Gordon designates photographs as paradoxically spectral and animating documents. She states, “[The photographs] provide the evidence that a disappearance is real only when it is apparitional, only when the missing or the lost or the not there shines through, there where it might not have been expected, there in that moment of affective recognition that is distinctive to haunting.” 17 Photographs can stir an affective response in the viewer who may have an emotional relationship with this lost person or object; indeed, when photographs appear in contexts of haunting, they become part of the interplay between familiarity and strangeness, hurting and healing, that the ghost registers. 18 In Ramito de hierbabuena, the immigrant’s death elicits the unleashing of what Tabea Alexa Linhard terms “postcolonial ghosts” that haunt Spanish sociality. 19 Indeed, following Linhard, it is clear that in Ramito de hierbabuena, the very nature of photographic representation combines with the textual explication to produce a text that shows that the past continues to condition the present. In his landmark work on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes explains that photographed corpses are never necessarily dead, but bring a dead image to life by virtue of the photographic apparatus in “a perverse confusion between . . . the Real and the Live.” 20 Azoulay similarly recognizes the vitality of the photographed corpse: “yes ‘I’m’ dead, yes ‘I’m’ bodiless, but ‘I’m’ still a presence that returns a gaze.” 21 The photographed corpse is thus infused with a vitality that becomes the unsettling, seething presence that reminds the living that the present remains connected to the past. Maimuna, the immigrant protagonist in Ramito de hierbabuena who has died in a patera is at the center of a criminal investigation. Eusebio Jara, a police captain, meets with Anselmo Fuertes, a forensic expert, to investigate the death of this immigrant woman, repeatedly described as beautiful and youthful. The two men represent the scientific, disciplinary capacities of the state and command narratives of configuring, documenting, and explaining bodies—and associated subjectivities—in a manner congruent with state policies on health, delinquency, and belonging. Maimuna’s boyfriend, Habib, arrives to identify the body, disrupting the scene heretofore occupied by Spanish nationals who are also agents of the state. Habib, who has seen the image of his girlfriend in the newspaper and on television, seeks to retrieve the body of his lost lover. Visuality is central to the narrative discourse of Ramito de hierbabuena; although Maimuna has perished, her photograph remains, circulating in print and on television, reshaping Spanish visual culture to include an injured foreigner. Thus, the visibly different and deceased immigrant occupies two symbolic sites as the lost lover who must be appropriately mourned and the enigmatic immigrant whose paradoxical presence as a corpse functions to exhume histories of affect and violence.

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Habib’s sole request is to return Maimuna to Sengangan, their village in Morocco, so that she may have a proper burial. Eusebio refuses to relinquish her body unless Habib provides a detailed account of what has transpired. To gain access to Maimuna’s body, Habib must comply with the state agents that have taken hold of her cadaver and allow them to appropriate his narrative. Throughout the novel, Eusebio repeatedly views the photograph of Maimuna as he advances in solving the case. The photograph, much like the dead body, becomes disconnected from the general public and associated with the criminal investigation, the authorities, and consequently, a perspective on migration focused on the state in which immigrants figure principally as “spectral and material supplements that facilitate national definition.” 22 Azoulay claims that photographs can serve as “the only civic refuge at the disposal of those robbed of citizenship. Thus, they incidentally benefit from the fact that citizens have accepted photography as a mediating agent in social relations.” 23 Photography could confer national recognition upon this immigrant woman as the public response to this image could potentially shift civic debate. Yet, while photographs in themselves eschew a literal meaning, a rigid, immutable signification is nonetheless imposed upon many photographs both by the news organizations and social structures that affix a linguistic message to that uncertain image in order to secure a meaning that often operates in tandem with official discourse. Ramito de hierbabuena proceeds in a similar fashion; the novel recounts a tale that delineates what the photo ought to signify and uncovers the shadowy, enduring legacy of Spain’s affective history with the Maghreb. For instance, when Habib arrives at the morgue, an assistant declares, “Don Anselmo, aquí fuera hay un moro que cree conocer a uno de los fiambres” 24 [Don Anselmo, there is a Moor outside who thinks he knows one of the stiffs]. The Moor as a figure of medieval and twenty-first-century Spain symbolizes the ways in which Spanish culture grapples with resolving the past in the present. As Daniela Flesler shows, current approaches to Moroccan immigration recall Spain’s encounter with the Moors to create a “disadjusted now” which entangles the past and present. 25 The figure of the Moor, the medieval enemy-invader whose return, according to Flesler, is feared in the collective imaginary serves to reassert Spain’s identity as a European, Catholic nation as established in 1492 with the expulsion of Jews and Muslims. In twentyfirst-century intercultural exchanges between Spaniards and Maghrebians, these past experiences remain; as Juan José Téllez Rubio postulates, “[el inmigrante] buscó futuro, encontró pasado” 26 [the immigrant sought a future, but discovered the past]. For Nieves García Benito this history remains geographically linked to the Strait of Gibraltar, “esta frontera no es una vuelta atrás de los viejos mitos, es una continuación” 27 [this border does not hearken back to old myths, but continues them].

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Flesler’s insightful work figures the Moor as an adversary frequently redeployed in contemporary discourses of immigration that intertwines the collective memory of the Reconquista with xenophobic responses to North African immigration. 28 While the Moor as invader is central to many depictions of men, women tend to operate on another symbolic level. Women are often constructed as objects of desire; and, much like territory, conquered women can serve to symbolize Spain’s dominance of a geopolitical region. Women as visual symbols of conquest are fundamental to colonial histories. Anne McClintock notes the primacy of women as symbols in colonial imagery, specifically, in relation to photography. She observes: The photograph, nonetheless, constituted a crisis in value between the aggressive empiricism of science, bent on achieving a “universal inventory of appearance” (a doctrine of externality) and the romantic metaphysics of inner, individual truth (a doctrine of internality). Again, the contradiction was displaced onto the feminized realm of empire. Colonial photography, framed as it was by metaphors of scientific knowledge as penetration, promised to seek out the secret interiors of the feminized Orient and there capture as surface, in the image of the harem woman’s body, the truth of the world. 29

The representation of women as land to be surveyed and explained through the mode of photography also occurs in Spanish iconography. In his comprehensive book La imagen del magrebí en España: Una perspectiva histórica, siglos XVI–XX, Eloy Martín Corrales presents a compendium of visual material, which, he claims, underscores the derogatory construction of Maghrebians in Spanish culture. 30 In some of the 850 images that comprise this text, nude or partially nude Maghrebian women appear in photographs taken during the colonial wars in Africa. These photographs represent a visually palatable commemoration of a series of battles that served to reconstitute the Spanish empire and preserve a traditional vision of Spain against the inroads of modernization. Violence sustains this seemingly innocuous imagery of exotic sexuality that facilitates national definition during colonization. The figure of the simultaneously desired and marginalized Maghrebian woman injects affect into Ramito de hierbabuena’s representative schema. In fact, the title refers to the term of endearment that Habib ascribes to Maimuna: a little sprig of mint. Affect, comprised of passions, moods, and emotions, also presupposes a cultural logic. In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, Sara Ahmed compellingly argues that emotions “should not be regarded as psychological states, but as social and cultural practices.” 31 Ahmed’s assertions also resonate with concepts of visuality and the social construction of bodies that I deem pivotal to representations of immigration; she observes that emotions not only exist in the individual and in the social sphere, but

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also produce the surfaces and boundaries that delineate the individual in relation to the society in which she lives. 32 I have noted many ways that Ramito de hierbabuena unites affect and violence. The plot, for example, focuses on both the criminal investigation of Maimuna’s death and Maimuna’s struggle for “true love” despite cultural, social, and national borders. Animated by her love for Habib, Maimuna disobeys her family, abandons her dutiful husband attained through an arranged marriage, and embarks upon the arduous voyage to Spain. She admits: “Sólo soy una mujer enamorada que lucha desde hace mucho tiempo por alcanzar la felicidad” 33 [I am just a woman in love who has been fighting to attain happiness for quite a while]. On the back cover of Ramito de hierbabuena, Muñoz Lorente even dubs the novel’s protagonists “verdaderos Romeo y Julieta de nuestro tiempo” [an authentic Romeo and Juliet for our time]. Allusion to Shakespeare’s work explains the surfeit of tragic moments in this text, but undermines the realistic model the novel putatively assumes. Emphasis on the romantic underpinnings of Maimuna’s journey trivializes the more material urgencies of contemporary immigration. Foregrounding love as the impetus behind Maimuna’s tragedy also brings the dead woman in closer proximity to the audience that reads her story. Love is “a sign of feminine respectability . . . the capacity to touch and be touched by others.” 34 Repeatedly extolled in the novel, Maimuna’s youthfulness, beauty, and openness to love coalesce to idealize her for the Western reader. At the same time, Maimuna’s status as a love object desired by Spanish men who anachronistically confer recognition upon her vis-à-vis medieval or colonial histories of affect and violence will result in her victimization and eventual annihilation in the text. In addition to love, the novel emphasizes happiness as an impetus for Maimuna’s migration, thus diminishing the gravity of the socioeconomic factors that frequently push immigrants to relocate. Maimuna’s happiness is inextricably linked to her love for Habib and her planned relocation. Sarah Ahmed writes, The freedom to be happy is premised on not only freedom from family or tradition but also the freedom to identify with the nation as the bearer of the promise of happiness. To identify with the nation, you become an individual. . . . Happiness is imagined as what allows subjects to embrace futurity, to leave the past behind them. 35

Indeed, duped by her family into an arranged marriage, Maimuna is prepared to leave her familial and cultural baggage behind for a new, independent life in Spain. Maimuna does not find a future in Spain with Habib. Instead, she encounters a past rooted in desire and violence that impinges

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upon her present and limits the independence she desires as she is continually misrecognized as a mora and subjected to atrocious violence. When Habib decides to migrate, he convinces his girlfriend, “Tranquila, todo saldrá bien. Dentro de unos meses, con un poco de suerte, estaremos juntos en España, viviendo dignamente y en disposición de ofrecerles a nuestros futuros hijos una vida menos miserable que la de aquí” 36 [Relax, everything will be fine. In a few months, with a little luck, we will be together in Spain, living honestly and able to provide our future children a better life than what we have here]. The text suggests that their work ethic and commitment to the ideals of meritocracy and self-advancement would allow them to lead a happy life together in Spain. The novel thus reveals the way in which migration does not result in happiness, but in its opposite: Maimuna faces the harsh realities of expendable personhood as an undocumented immigrant and eventually dies in the Strait of Gibraltar. Through arrangements made with Habib’s organized crime contacts in Melilla, Maimuna receives an opportunity to work as a maid. She has already declared that she would prefer to die than work as a prostitute, an activity that would besmirch her character and her love for Habib, thus heightening the aforementioned characterization of Maimuna founded on feminine respectability and love. Maimuna’s honorable assertions are almost immediately offset with the ignoble actions of the men in the crime ring who are supposed to help her. They drug and rape Maimuna and sell her into captivity. Their attack begins with a seemingly friendly inquiry: “Digo que siento curiosidad por algunas cosas que me han contado de vosotras, las moras” 37 [I’m just curious because of some things I have heard about you Moorish women]. Like several other Spaniards who encounter Maimuna, her attacker refers to her as a mora, hence, confirming an ahistorical interpretation of Maimuna through the lens of centuries-old histories. After the rape, the men tattoo Maimuna and present her to a Spanish man; upon seeing her for the first time, he smiles and says “Laila.” 38 Following this unexpected meeting, a new chapter begins. Entitled, “el infierno,” this section narrates Maimuna’s experiences in a basement-dungeon where she is chained to a bed. Maimuna’s kidnapper is a mentally ill, retired army officer who visits her regularly, alternating between his two personalities: Lalo, who abuses her physically and sexually, and Lalito, a child who begs her to care for him. Lalo confuses Maimuna with Laila, his Moroccan nanny. He continually seeks poor Moroccan women who look like Laila, gives them a tattoo identical to hers, and then attempts to recreate his childhood experiences with her in his basement. Rather than work as a maid, as promised, Maimuna is forced to resurrect an affective history of Moroccan proximity and care-work for her deranged captor. The two positions of Lalo and Laila are significant. Maimuna assaults Lalo and leaves him permanently impaired with brain damage. When the

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mystery is finally solved, the reader learns that Lalo is not only an army captain, but also father-in-law to a police officer investigating Maimuna’s case. Both the army and the police force symbolize the power of the state to wield institutionalized violence. Lalo’s proximity to a policeman, his army ties, and his mental illness lead many officers to believe that his criminal activities with undocumented immigrant women—who are ostensibly expendable—ought to remain a secret. Indeed, Lalo’s actions are depicted as problematically individualistic—the result of his mental illness—and belie the extent to which immigrants face collective forms of violence and marginalization, articulated, for example, through legislation and social practices. Laila, Lalo’s caregiver whose name signifies “dark beauty,” nurtured Spanish people, who in response violate her and banish her in a process eerily similar to narratives of undocumented migration and forced repatriation, such as the one the reader encounters in Ramito de hierbabuena. The past continues to spill over into the present through the story of Laila-Maimuna; and a new dark beauty, an undocumented immigrant seeking happiness and fulfillment in Spain, supplants the now dead Laila. The atrocities Laila faced at the hands of her Spanish employers as a domestic worker juxtaposed with Maimuna’s kidnapping and abuse call the reader’s attention to the persistence of intercultural violence in the current, purportedly “postcolonial” moment. As Anne McClintock posits in her critique of the term postcolonial: “Colonialism returns at the moment of its disappearance.” 39 The prefix post thus belies the continuities and discontinuities of power in contemporary exchanges with colonial traces, manifest in phenomena like immigration. Desire is also a central component of Maimuna’s intercultural encounters, signaling the possibility of both love and violence, for this Moroccan woman. 40 Utilizing an army captain—who represents state violence—and a migrant domestic worker—who symbolizes foreign caregiving—permits a disconcerting intermingling that unites an affective history with abuse and thus, evinces the paradoxical nature of responses to Otherness, which oscillate between rejection and desire. The affective history of Lalo and Laila is not the only one narrated in Ramito de hierbabuena. The novel also explicitly refers to the medieval history of al-Andalus in a chapter that contrasts with “El infierno” [hell] appropriately entitled “El paraíso” [heaven]. After Maimuna escapes from Lalo’s basement, she meets Rafael, a kind Andalusian man who cares for her and gives her a tour of Granada. When she sees the grandeur of the Alhambra, Maimuna both boasts and laments, “Todo eso fue construido por mis antepasados,” 41 [all this was built by my forefathers] and Rafael assents encouragingly. Rafael offers to educate her on the history of al-Andalus; yet, he distorts historical events, inventing happy endings featuring Spanish men and Maghrebian women to create a romantic ambiance. The paradise described in the chapter’s title could refer to the one ostensibly

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found—and lost—in Spain by the Moors centuries before. The Alhambra as a monumentalized site of memory serves as a structure that reminds the reader of the Moors, who altered the Iberian cultural landscape in the Middle Ages. In the twenty-first century, Spain remains a contact zone in which Iberian and Maghrebian peoples and cultures converge. More recent histories of migration remain subjugated to encounters from centuries ago, manifest in Rafael’s deceptive accounts that entwine his desire for Maimuna in the twenty-first century with the medieval histories of Al-Andalus. Referring to al-Andalus and the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula prefigures Maimuna’s death. Forcibly connected to the past, the novel implies that Maimuna will not move forward. Her brief vacation with Rafael culminates in deportation in a textual maneuver that confirms that Maimuna is trespassing upon Spanish national space. Despite the architectural structures reminiscent of her Islamic, Maghrebian culture, Maimuna is not authorized to find happiness in Spain. Undeterred, she endeavors to return to reunite with Habib again. During the difficult journey in the patera, Yasmina, Maimuna’s sickly friend, is too weak to hold on and slips into the sea. Maimuna’s final moments are spent quarrelling with the craft’s pilot as she attempts to convince him to search for her friend before she drowns. Thus, even in extreme circumstances, Maimuna continues to transmit grace and loving devotion to others. The pilot, much like the hardened criminals Maimuna encountered in Spain, is not swayed by her compassion; he cruelly ejects her from the patera, and the tragedy foretold in the photograph comes to its conclusion. The viewer is the ultimate referent of every photo, and Ramito de hierbabuena locates the gaze in the powerful nationals, particularly, the forensic specialist and the police captain who represent the state. This detail exhibits the work’s posture toward loss and migration. These men view and interpret Maimuna with the assistance of Habib, who vanishes as they assume control of his narrative; in the end, the Spanish author transforms into the ultimate viewer of the photograph. Both this image and the way it is utilized and interpreted capture the “postcolonial,” neocolonial dynamic at work in approaches to Maghrebian immigration. Indeed, the narrative accompanying the photograph reveals the ways in which Maghrebian voices—in this case, those of Habib and Maimuna—are hollowed out and serve as mere echoes ultimately overpowered by the Spanish author’s discourse. Despite her insistence on the inclusionary nature of photography, Azoulay acknowledges the violent possibilities of this medium. She states: Photography traps one in its paradox. To give expression to the fact that a photographed person’s citizen status is flawed, or even nonexistent . . . or temporarily suspended. . . . Whoever seeks to use photography must exploit the photographed individual’s vulnerability. In such situations, photography

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entails a particular kind of violence: The photograph is liable to exploit the photographed individual, aggravate his or her injury, publicly expose it, and rob the individual of intimacy. This threat of violation always hangs over the photographic act, and this is the precise moment in which the contract between photographer, photographed, and spectator is put to the test. 42

Ramito de hierbabuena purports to offer an immigrant-focused counternarrative to official discourse of immigration. Yet, upon narrativizing the photograph, Muñoz Lorente emits a ghost story of sorts predicated on the eerie silence of the dead Maghrebian on whom the novel is based. The populist sentiment that animates his writing cannot escape the violent strictures of collective approaches to immigration. Thus the novel interprets and reenacts the drama shown in the photograph from a national, ethnocentric standpoint. Despite the ostensible good will in creating a story for the woman’s life and death, this uncritical appropriation and formulation into a police plot intensifies her violent marginalization. Violence is a constitutive element of the novel, which aggravates the injury of the anonymous woman photographed by inundating the reader with jarring scenes in which Maimuna experiences assault, rape, kidnapping, and even a gruesome, in-home abortion. Other immigrants and Spanish criminals are subject to abuse, murder, or castration. These brutal episodes unquestioningly link migration with conflict, corporeal violation, and perversion. In Ramito de hierbabuena, the photograph serves to transmit both materiality as a tangible object and spectrality in its representation of a moment lost forever, in this instance, an immigrant’s death, which accentuates the notion of spectrality. These characteristics of the photograph of the deceased immigrant—spectrality and visual alterity—combine with the novel’s excessive violence to emphasize the immigrant’s Otherness in the novel. Like the twenty thousand reed crosses on the beaches of Granada, the image and text that comprise Ramito de hierbabuena reveal the traces of immigrant histories that remain unresolved in the collective imaginary and condition and influence the present. The photograph allows for a visual interaction with a dead person, yet sight ultimately leads to that which is unseen. Ramito de hierbabuena intentionally uses a photograph that could be interpreted in a plethora of ways to conjure Spain’s affective and conflictive histories with North Africa and, thus, unwittingly espouses nationalistic discourses that cast Maghrebian immigrants as a symbolic site of continuity with an apparently unfinished history of exoticization, violence, and Otherness.

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NOTES 1. Miguel A. Ortega Lucas, “Más de 20.000 cadáveres invisibles bajo las aguas del Mar Mediterráneo,” Memoria de las migraciones de Aragón, August 8, 2013, http://www. memoriadelasmigracionesdearagon.com/historia_1.php?historia_id=115 (accessed July 13, 2015). 2. In October 2013, a boat transporting immigrants from North Africa to Lampedusa, Italy, capsized; and three hundred men, women, and children died. The Italian government recently granted postmortem citizenship to the three hundred immigrants who died, while continuing to deny the same rights to living immigrants who possibly survived a similarly dangerous voyage, in a gesture that confirms a problematic connection to the dead that simultaneously ignores and marginalizes the living. 3. Gerardo Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena (Barcelona: Plaza & Janes, 2001). 4. Several scholars have argued that haunting is a constitutive element of contemporary Spanish culture owing to the ongoing negotiation of collective traumas that occurred during the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco. See José Colmeiro’s Memoria histórica e identidad cultural (Rubí, Barcelona: Anthropos Editorial, 2005); Jo Labanyi’s “Introduction: Engaging with Ghosts; or, Theorizing Culture in Modern Spain,” in Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice, ed. Labanyi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–14; Joan Ramon Resina, Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000); and Alberto Medina Domínguez’s Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas en la España de la Transición (Madrid: Ediciones Libertarias, 2001). 5. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 16–17. 6. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 7. Many recent works have analyzed the image of the immigrant in contemporary Spanish media. See Montserrat Iglesias Santos’s edited volume Imágenes del otro: Identidad e inmigración en la literatura y el cine (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2010); Isabel Santaolalla, Los otros: Etnicidad y “raza” en el cine español contemporáneo (Madrid: 81/2; Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2005); Yeon Soo Kim, The Family Album: Histories, Subjectivities, and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005); and Eloy Martín Corrales, La imagen del magrebí en España: Una perspectiva histórica, Siglo XVII–XX (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2002). 8. In his posthumously published Guerra en España, 1936–1953, Juan Ramón Jiménez combines prose, verse, and photographs to assemble a comprehensive depiction of the 1930s sociopolitical milieu (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985). Similarly, Juan José Millás’s collection Todo son preguntas (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2005), consists of (thirty-one photographs that he discusses in what constitutes a timely commentary on early twenty-first-century politics and (visual) culture. And in Por la via de Tarifa (Madrid: Editorial Calambur, 2000), Nieves García Benito interweaves black and white photographs with narratives of African immigration. These texts thus express the documentary capacities and the interpretive impetus that often inform the inclusion of photography in texts. 9. See special issue of Hispanic Issues Online, “On Photography, History, and Memory in Spain,” edited by Maria Nilsson, special issue, Hispanic Issues On Line Debates 3 (Spring 2011). 10. As Anne McClintock notes, photography is a “technology of representation and a technology of power” (Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Contest [London: Routledge, 1995], 126; emphasis mine). Parvati Nair also signals photography’s potential to uphold asymmetrical power relations, stating, “the mere language of photography—to ‘frame,’ to ‘shoot,’ ‘to capture’—speaks of alienation, domination, and even violence” (“Autography from the Margins: Photography, Collective Self-Representation, and the Disturbance of History,” Hispanic Research Journal 9, no. 2 [April 2008]: 185). 11. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture: Towards a Polycentric Aesthetics,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 55.

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12. Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, “Afterword: On Referentiality, Dissent, and the Inescapability of Context,” in “On Photography, History, and Memory in Spain,” special issue, Hispanic Issues On Line Debates 3 (Spring 2011): 130, http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/ doc/07_AFTERWORD.pdf (accessed February 5, 2013). 13. Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 202. 14. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 11. 15. Philippe Dubois, L’acte photographique (Paris: Nathan and Labor, 1983), quoted in Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” October 34 (Autumn 1985): 83. 16. Metz also states: “Even when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was has forever vanished. Strictly speaking, the person who has been photographed— not the total person, who is an effect of time—is dead” (“Photography and Fetish,” 84). Roland Barthes also refers to the deathlike nature of photography, indicating the photograph always refers to: “the thing that has been there” (“Photography and Fetish,” 76). Spanish Nobel Laureate Juan Ramón Jiménez claims that photography, in its ability to capture a moment lost forever constitutes “la misma muerte” [death in itself] (“Photography and Fetish,” 379). 17. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 102; emphasis mine. 18. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 103. 19. Tabea Alexa Linhard, “Between Hostility and Hospitality: Immigration in Contemporary Spain,” Modern Language Notes 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 401. 20. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 79. 21. Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008), 338. 22. Georgina Dopico Black, “Ghostly Remains: Valencia, 1609,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 7, no. 1 (2003): 100. Dopico Black refers to the 1609 edict that mandated the expulsion of the moriscos, converted Moors. The edict specifically states that adults were responsible for the moriscos’ crimes against the Spanish Kingdom; morisco children under the age of five, in contrast, were ordered to remain in Spain. Dopico Black analyzes the question of nation-building through the discursive construction of these children, who constitute a spectral remnant that serves to produce Spanish culture in their allusion to the presence and removal of their forebears. 23. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 113. Azoulay subtly challenges Susan Sontag’s assumption that while photography produces an ethics of seeing, it is ultimately an act of non-intervention (The Civil Contract of Photography, 8). Azoulay explicitly accentuates the primacy of the spectator whose very viewing constitutes an act of social engagement. She states: “[For Sontag,] Any attempt to start speaking for the photo is akin to an effort to revive the dead. Her ‘ethics of seeing’ is based on an aesthetic judgment and gives no attention to the civil contract of photography” (The Civil Contract of Photography, 122). 24. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 15; emphasis mine. 25. Daniela Flesler, The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008), 56–57. 26. Juan José Téllez Rubio, Moros en la costa (Madrid: Editorial Debate, 2001), 13. 27. Nieves García Benito, “Por la vía de Tarifa o la letra con sangre entra” in Literatura y pateras, ed. Soler Espiauba (Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2004), 65. 28. Flesler asserts, “The figure of the violent, lustful Moor, who invades Spain to kill and rape its inhabitants has haunted the Spanish imagination, aided by what seemed to be ‘real’ repetitions of the 711 invasion throughout Spanish history” (“Contemporary Moroccan Immigration and Its Ghosts,” in In the Light of Medieval Spain, ed. Simon R. Doubleday and David Coleman [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008], 117). 29. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 124. 30. Susan Martín-Márquez argues, “Martín Corrales fails to acknowledge those moments in which the Spanish trajectory departed from that of Europe” (Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008], 62). She specifically questions Martín Corrales’s refusal to consider sympathetic por-

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trayals of Moroccans as anything other than “exceptional” rather than a structuring element of Spanish identity (Disorientations, 63). 31. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 9. 32. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 1, 10. 33. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 225. 34. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 124; emphasis mine. 35. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 137; emphasis in the original. 36. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 147. 37. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 197. 38. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 208. 39. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 11. 40. Flesler reads a variety of intercultural love stories to establish that the trend of impossible love is pervasive and thus symbolically expresses the cultural incompatibility between Spaniards and Moroccan immigrants (The Return of the Moor, 131–34). 41. Muñoz Lorente, Ramito de hierbabuena, 256. 42. Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography, 111–12.

Chapter Nine

Memento Mori Photography and Narrative in Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie Me verá Llorar Marta Sierra

When Walter Benjamin published “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in 1936, Europe’s euphoria over the potential of modern technology had been exhausted. Benjamin’s comments on the vanishing of the aura of the work of art attest to modernity’s ambivalent relationship to technology: “One might subsume the eliminated element in the term ‘aura’ and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” 1 For Benjamin, technology brings art and the spectator closer through a “new sensorium,” whereas it paradoxically erases the “authenticity” that was attached to premodern artistic productions. 2 The nostalgic tone in Benjamin’s essay not only signals a loss in art, but most importantly a loss in modern communication. How does art help perpetuate a sense of community in a society ruled by mechanical reproduction? It is in photography where the double edge of technological influence is most evident. Because photographs create the illusion of proximity to the referent, scientists trust them as reliable means of communicating facts. Boris Kossoy expands on Benjamin’s description of portraits as the last cult object in the age of mechanical reproduction when he explains that daguerrotypes became “an object that not only preserved the precise memory of time and appearance, but did so ‘artistically,’ would be part of one of the rising middle classes’ most precious possessions.” 3 As a unique image that could not be copied, the daguerreotype mattered to people for its ability to perpetuate one’s image. The transparency of the photographic image, the adherence to its reference, led to two parallel regimes of visuality: one of control and 151

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surveillance; the other linked to the realm of emotions and the cult of the portrait as a token of social identity. But as Roland Barthes argues, photographs establish this visual illusion by transforming the subject into an “other”; “when I discover myself in the product of this operation, what I see is that I have become Total Image, which is to say, Death in person; others— the Other—do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object.” 4 Photographic representation carries a burden—suggests Barthes— that of the death of the subject. Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar [No one will see me cry] (first published in 1999) 5 examines similar issues of subjectivity and representation by combining photography and fiction. A historian by training, Rivera Garza explores how narratives work both in history and literature through tensions between voice and vision, the speaking and the seeing subject, the photographic archive and the oral testimony. 6 Nadie me verá llorar seeks to breach the gap between historical narrative and its subjects by creating a visual proximity to the past. Many sections engage in a reflection on the impact of mechanical reproduction in literature and art and have, as does Benjamin’s essay, a profoundly modern tone of faith and distrust of technological modernity. Written both as a personal and collective narrative of Mexican history of the early twentieth century, many sections of Rivera Garza’s novel are narrated through the perspective of photographs. Nadie me verá llorar reads at times as a beautiful tapestry of images of the Mexico of the Porfiriato, a collage of postcards that recreates for the reader the “powerful recollection and sensory immediacy” characteristic of images. 7 The novel presents a “photo-textuality” as it establishes a close connection between visual and verbal elements. 8 The narrative centers on the life story of a prostitute, Matilda Burgos, an inmate at La Castañeda asylum in Mexico City, during the transition from the Porfiriato to the Revolution. Her life is retold from the combined perspectives of photographer Joaquín Buitrago, doctor Eduardo Oligochea, and Matilda herself. The act of retelling places memory at the forefront in this text. How do literature and history reconstruct the past? What does a narrative include and what does it leave out? Are images reliable sources for keeping record of personal and collective historical memory? It is in this tension between presence and absence or what is represented and what is omitted, that the novel bases its most powerful aesthetic and ethical questions. This is a novel about death, on many levels; it draws on the voices of the dead, those historical characters who have been erased, whose voices have been omitted in the records of Mexico’s official histories. But it is also an examination of how death is part of the very act to narrate or, better yet, to represent, as the narrator (as the photographer) captures a voice, and fixes subjectivity in a representation. Photography, as an auxiliary narrative technique, is at the center of this inquiry.

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As such, Rivera Garza’s work needs to be approached from a double perspective. First, as a testimonial, a countermemory, an alternative narrative of the Porfiriato years, 9 told from the perspective of the ghosts of Mexican modernity. The novel engages in storytelling, but, more specifically, in history-telling, a reconstruction of the Porfiriato years from the perspective of a feminine spectral presence. Second, and most significantly, is the feminist critique of Mexican modernity: the novel’s central ghost is not Matilda’s character, but the feminine as a threat to the process of building the modern nation. The interaction between photography and text allows for a critical feminist reconstruction of historical narratives. In other words, the previous questions can be rephrased, simply, in one: How are women the erased images, the omitted voices in the historical telling of Mexican modernity? Perceived as a source of social disorder, women were at the center of inquiry of statesmen, intellectuals, and doctors. Because they were believed to hold the future of the nation, women’s bodies were examined, measured, photographed, and turned into objects of inquiry. According to Rivera Garza’s own research, medical research contributed to the production of well-defined social identities for women as depicted in the “hegemonic figure of the domestic angel, the good woman and her wicked, perverse twin sister, the prostitute.” 10 The central voice heard in the novel, though fictional, carries the voices of this allegorical female subject, the woman of the Porfiriato whose voice and body was altered, manipulated, and scripted in order to fit the official expectations of the modern nation in the making. Matilda’s ghost has the power of an unsettled subjectivity. She is a prostitute believed to be insane for she “habla demasiado” 11 [talks a great deal]. Although she “tiene buena conducta” 12 [demonstrates good conduct] while at the asylum, the novel retells her story from a perspective that confronts the different repressive systems that have sought to silence her. Obedient, yet vocal, her ghostly presence traces a dissonant speech, a voice recorded over hegemonic discourses on women. This novel is a hauntology. By contradicting the ontological presuppositions of a biography, this novel narrates a life story from a radically different logical order, that of the ghost, leading to a paradoxical state of neither being present or absent, dead or alive. Colin Davis reveals that Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ghost is an unstable mystery; it gives voice to a radical otherness that resists symbolization. 13 Davis describes that, for Derrida, attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction because it represents an encounter with an otherness, one which must be preserved. 14 To quote Avery F. Gordon, the “ghostly matters” in this fictional critical deconstruction and reconstruction of historical narratives: The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make

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Rivera Garza explores the spectral elements of hegemonic narratives that reduce individuals—and women in particular—to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences leaving no trace in many historical accounts. “To study social life one must confront the ghostly aspects of it,” Gordon establishes. 16 The interplay of text and photography allows for an aesthetic project where the ghosts of Mexican modernity finally speak from the grave; they are no longer trapped in photographical narratives, but rather they are free to tell their own story. As a historian, as a writer, Rivera Garza is able to modulate a narrative voice that goes back and forth to the social archive. Fiction is thus the ultimate tool of a critical feminist deconstruction of history. This ghostly retelling is the central aesthetic and ethical project of Rivera Garza’s work. PHOTOGRAPHY AND TEXT Photography has several narrative uses in the novel. First, it refers to historical research and the role of photographs in interviews in order to stimulate the memory of the informant. This novel is about conducting an impossible interview with one of the many prostitutes Rivera Garza studied on her research on La Castañeda’s records. Referring to photography as one of the tools of social sciences, Elizabeth Jelin explains that they create an “ambigüeidad situada” 17 [situated ambiguity] for the interviewee that open possibilities for new meanings and reinterpretation of images. The photographer, Joaquín Buitrago, acts as Rivera Garza’s fictional alter ego, conducting research that is both historical and aesthetical about how to reconstruct Matilda’s subjectivity by using only a fragmented and incomplete archive. Joaquín shows Matilda different photographs to prompt her imagination in the process of retelling her story. For instance, pictures of the archeological site of El Tajín lead her to remember endearing moments of her childhood, the last she spent with her mother before being sent to Mexico City to live with her uncle, a doctor named Marcos Burgos. The pictures, taken by explorers Teoberto Maler and Hugo Breheme, are archeological depictions of the site. As the ruins they describe, these images are metonymical references of Matilda’s fragmented memory. A central element in this scene is the interaction between image and text: photographs are supplemented by Matilda’s memories; images become alive as she remembers, as she describes what she saw, what she felt that last day in El Tajín. History does not allow revisiting and rewriting facts; but fiction, Rivera Garza suggests, is a fluid space where historical moments and characters can become alive. By com-

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bining photographs and narration, the novel establishes a dialectical relation between past and present, the archive and the performance of history: Más que en la monumental vista general, quiere que ella se fije en los bajorrelieves repletos de una constante repetición de entrelaces, en la decoración de grecas escalonadas compuestos en mosaico de piedras. Cuando ella no sabe qué ver, Joaquín le señala las cornisas, las celdillas, el juego de volúmenes que produce una desconcertante danza de claroscuros en pleno movimiento. 18 [More than the monumental general panorama, he wants her to focus on the bas-reliefs swarming with a constant repetition of intertwined figures, the decoration of layered friezes of stone mosaic. When she is unsure what to look at, Joaquín points out the cornices, the little cells, the play of volumes that produces a dizzying dance of chiaroscuro in movement.] 19

Photographs, used throughout as narrative devices, create in the reader a sense of immediacy to historical facts. The main narrator, Joaquin, acting as both a historian and a writer, seeks to reconstruct what is not revealed in the great panorama of history. He skillfully leads his informant into the missing details, shedding light onto the less apparent trails, the ghostly surfaces of historical narratives. Rivera Garza’s novel is a “claroscuro en pleno movimiento” 20 [chiaroscuro in movement], a dancing of lights and shades creating dramatic effects on the texture of the otherwise monochrome narrative of history. Fluctuating between the seen and the unseen, the visual immediacy of photographs and the spacing characteristic of writing, this novel has the format of an imagetext using the term coined by W. J. T. Mitchell. 21 Nadie me verá llorar works within what Mitchell refers to an “inseparable suturing” 22 of visual and verbal processes of representation. 23 It brings back to life Matilda’s life story while working as a powerful memento mori, for she witnesses once again the loss of her mother, the painful uprooting of her natal town. As an example of what Barthes might call the “spectrum of the photograph,” Rivera Garza’s novel is a spectral narrative because it signals both the production of a spectacle—a representation—and yet the ineffable thing which haunts it: the impossibility to fully represent death and the inexorable passing of time. 24 Rivera Garza’s usage of photography, and of historical narratives, seems to confirm Susan Sontag’s views on photography as a tribute to life and a revelation of our own mortality. 25 PERFORMING THE HIGIENISTA ARCHIVE Why is vision such a predominant strategy in this novel? Nadie me verá llorar takes place during the height of higienismo [higienism], a social policy derived from Positivism. Rivera Garza’s research on prostitution and the mentally ill in late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Mexico

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informs the novel on many levels. An important aspect of her research deals with the internal contradictions in the state’s regulation of sexuality and its impact on the subaltern’s agency. Shifting the focus between the three main characters, this work is a collage that incorporates a variety of sources, including literary, scientific, and popular texts from the period dealing with the formation of modern medicine and the nation state in Mexico—for instance, Federico Gamboa’s Naturalist novel Santa (1903). 26 Nadie me verá llorar establishes a rich and at times critical dialogue with these intertextualities in order to contest the transformation of women’s sexuality into a public health issue. As Rivera Garza states, disciplines, legislation, and institutions produced a sexual subject, which was also female par excellence. Feared because it was active; dangerous because it could transmit disease; in need of control because, if unsupervised, it could cause the destruction of the family and the entire nation. The power ascribed to this sexual subject was, without doubt, enormous. Was it a pretense designed to facilitate the exercise of the vertical power of the state? Was it perhaps real? 27

The linking of the female genitalia to pathological, physical, and psychological phenomena was common during this period, and institutionalization was the way to regulate and study the anomalous female body. Photography played a central role in the commodification of the female body. Framed according to visual codes that John Tagg describes as guided by the “burden of frontality,” the photographs of prostitutes, along with those of criminals and the insane, signify a bluntness and naturalness that present women as objects of supervision or reform. 28 Erotic undertones are present in many of these pseudoscientific photographs. Rivera Garza manipulates such visual archives following a tradition of Surrealist experimentation. Spacing is one of the main strategies to break this illusion of visual commodification of the female body in photography. Referring to the Surrealists, Rosalind E. Krauss states, “the photographic image, thus ‘spaced’ is deprived of one of the most powerful of photography’s many illusions: it is robbed of a sense of presence. It is the image of simultaneity. It is spacing that makes clear that we are not looking at reality, but at the world infested by interpretation or signification.” 29 The “spaced” nature of the image challenges the ontological reification in photographical records. First, the novel creates a space between Matilda and her representation by juxtaposing her voice to the photographical record. She is a performative subject who situates herself outside of the visual archive, in an imaginary narrative flux that rewrites her position in hegemonic historical narratives. Her dissonant voice contests a set of discourses that seek to regulate women’s subjectivity, represented by the perspectives of art (Joaquín) and science (Eduardo). Built as a network of contradictory and, at times,

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confrontational discourses on women’s role in the modern nation, Nadie me verá llorar breaks the illusion of photographic representation along with the univocal narrative through a polyphony of voices. As Laura M. Kanost states, “these multiple narrative strategies point to and reinforce a central preoccupation at work on many levels in the novel: the ethical problem of how one person can access and represent another individual’s private history and perspective.” 30 Key in this polyphony of voices is the use of parody and intertextuality. Gamboa’s Santa is instrumental in supplementing the image of women as puppets of literary or artistic representation by male authors. References from hygienist treatises on women’s sexuality further reinforce this commodification of femininity and the dangers of an unruly subjectivity, and construct a normative perspective against which the novel establishes the possibilities of a critical revision: “Los ovarios y el útero son centros de acción que se reflejan en el cerebro de la mujer y que pueden determinar enfermedades terribles y pasiones hasta ahora desconocidas” 31 [The uterus and ovaries are centers of action reflected in the woman’s brain. They may cause terrible illnesses and hitherto unknown passions]. Rivera Garza’s own fictionalized voice intervenes in many sections as the historian’s perspective issuing different commentaries on her research on women and public health, as if establishing a dialogue with the higienista archive. This narrative voice breaks another illusion: that of the scientific objectivity of history by infusing Rivera Garza’s feminist views on the issue. The performative quality of Rivera Garza’s novel reveals new possibilities for female agency. The sections describing Matilda and Ligia Morales’s erotic performances in the bordello La Modernidad challenge the Porfiriato’s regulations on gender and sexuality. The two women—who called themselves La Diablesa and Diamantina—parody higienista discourses by entitling their performances as “El abrazo de la sífilis” [Syphilis’s embrace], “Enfermedad” [Illness], “Cárcel” [Jail], “Hospital” [Hospital], “Neurastenia” [Neurasthenia], and “Reglamento” [Regulation]. But their most famous performance is the one parodying Santa: “Para divertirse, ‘La Diamantina’ quiso representar una parodia de Santa y se salió con la suya. Mientras que ella misma se hizo cargo de transformar a la provinciana estúpida en una dama con alas de dragon, Matilda se convirtió en un hombre de frac cuya inocencia e ignorancia del bajo mundo le ganaron el apelativo de ‘El Menso’” 32 [As a lark, “La Diamantina” wanted to perform a parody of Santa, and she convinced Ligia to do it. While she herself went about transforming the stupid, provincial heroine into a fine lady with dragon’s wings, Matilda became a man in a tuxedo, whose naiveté and ignorance of the demimonde earned him the nickname “The Idiot”].

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As Vicky Unruh explains, the performative quality of Latin America’s early twentieth-century literary culture, “offers a conceptual bridge between these women’s public activity and the investigative itineraries of their writing.” 33 Nadie me verá llorar thus explores the possibilities and challenges of women’s writing through the image of the “performing woman.” This recurrent image at the beginning of the twentieth century contrasts with the woman as object of contemplation or inspiration that populated late-nineteenth-century Spanish American modernismo. Unruh says, “Much as the classical muses synthesized the capacity for inspiration with their own artistic talent, the performing woman as portrayed in Latin American literary culture of the time offered a bridge from representations of women as art objects or catalysts to their conception as cultural actors.” 34 Placed in the context of the bordello La Modernidad—a place that inverts dreams of modernity of the Porfiriato era—these performing women challenge the process of commodification and reification present in medical archives and public regulations on female sexuality. In addition, by showing women as creators of an alternative narrative, a countermemory, the female ghosts of Porfiriato offer new the possibilities of female agency within the literary culture of this period. The title, “no one will ever see me cry,” refers to Matilda’s resilience through years of enduring difficulties, but also to the mysteries of her subjectivity and the challenges of representing it. Thus, a central issue is how language constructs an “other,” how words define a subjectivity and position it within a social order. This “other” is the allegorical female subject, a radical otherness that resists both the efforts from the higienista archive and the literary culture to code it. On one side of the spectrum, Eduardo Oligochea represents the language of medicalization, the discourse of higienista theories of the turn of the twentieth century. He is “haunted” by the voices of those inmates whose stories he studies from a scientific perspective: “Las manos de Eduardo Oligochea yacen sobre los papeles amontonados, inertes. Tras sus anteojos la mirada perdida. El aturdimiento de todas las historias se vuelve insoportable, ciertas tardes de invierno” 35 [Eduardo Oligochea’s hands lie inert on the stacks of papers. Behind his spectacles, his gaze vacant. The confusion and dullness of mind caused by all these case histories make certain winter afternoons unbearable]. The novel examines the medical language of the higienista archive as a site of permanent contradiction where the female patients’ voices surface as a threat to medicine’s attempts to organize and regulate disease. “Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony,” Derrida states 36 and it is in the asylum files where this haunting can be seen as, fundamentally, an issue of language. According to Davis, “[t]he ghost is ‘unnamable or almost’ because it pushes at the boundaries of language and thought.” 37 Oligochea’s impossible task is to summon up modernity’s feminine spectral presence and to translate it to the language of modern science. Rivera Garza’s novel proposes that

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medicine is ill prepared to deal with the “necessary interlocutor” of this specter. 38 Although Oligochea fashions himself as a skilled translator of the language of insanity, his futile obsession with medical terms reveals his limitations in interpreting this radical otherness: “Para poder vivir dentro hora tras hora, cinco días a la semana, Eduardo Oligochea tiene que aprender a evadir el remolino de las palabras, su temblor, sus saltos de grillo sobre las hojas de la realidad. Una mano es una mano. Una jeringa es una jeringa. La tautología es la reina de su corazón, la única” 39 [In order to live inside hour after hour, five days a week, Eduardo Oligochea must learn to avoid the whirlwind of words, their shifting ground, their grasshopper-like leaps from leaf to leaf of reality. A hand is a hand. A syringe is a syringe. Tautology is the queen of his heart, the only monarch].

As the impossible precision of the archive haunts Eduardo, Joaquín fears the color white as the menace to his creative passion. For Joaquín, women are symbolized by the color white, a void that the artist does not have the necessary skills to represent. Matilda parodies Modernista’s literary representations of women’s sexuality. For instance, she reads to Joaquín the verses of Gutiérrez Nájera’s “De blanco: ¡Oh mármol! ¡Oh nieve! ¡Oh inmensa blancura / que esparces doquiera tu casta hermosura! / ¡Oh tímida virgen! ¡Oh casta vestal!” 40 [Oh marble! Oh snow! Oh unsullied whiteness / by thy chaste beauty sown abroad! / Oh timid virgin, vestal chase!]. Matilda laughs as she reads; women are ghosts, she suggests, for they never fit into men’s limited imagination: “Pobre hombre. ¿Qué clases de mujeres conocería? Tímida virgen, válgame Dios” 41 [Poor man. What kind of women must he know? “Timid virgin,” for heaven’s sake!], Matilda adds. Women are thus the female ghosts that haunt Mexican modernity. In the words of the fictionalized Rivera Garza: “La salud pública, el crecimiento de la nación y la mera posibilidad de la sobrevivencia de la humanidad dependían de la erradicación del oficio más antiguo de la tierra. Su única alternativa para evitar el contagio, tanto físico como moral, consistía en perseguir la prostitución como un crimen contra las buenas costumbres y la salud de la nación” 42 [Public health, the growth of the nation, and, most important of all, the survival of the human race depended on the eradication of the oldest profession in the world. The only alternative for avoiding contagion, both moral and physical, was targeting prostitution as a crime against good manners and the health of the nation]. Throughout the novel, Matilda’s voice challenges the association of modernity and photography, and its role in controlling the “anomalous subject” of women in favor of the consolidation of a modern nation-state. Her position is that of an errancy, a dislocation, a misplacing of the image of the female body within the archive. As Esther Gabara states in relation to photography during this period in Mexico,

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“photographic theory at the time classified the medium itself as ‘feminine.’” 43 The novel’s title also signifies a rejection to this regime of visuality that found in photography a powerful ally to the control of what was perceived as women’s unruly sexuality. At the end of the novel, Matilda imagines a world without eyes, a world in which she circulates as an invisible ghost: Las miradas masculinas la han perseguido toda la vida. Con deseo o con exhaustividad, animadas por la lujuria o el por el afán científico, los ojos de los hombres han visto, medido y evaluado su cuerpo primero, y después su mente, hasta el hartazgo. En la luz húmeda de Julio lo único que desea es volverse invisible. Su sueño es pasar inadvertida. 44 [Men’s eyes have pursued her her entire life. With desire or meticulousness, filled with lust or scientific curiosity, men’s eyes have seen, measured, and evaluated her body first, and then her mind, ad nauseam. Literally. In the humid light of July, the only thing she wants is to become invisible. Her dream is to go unnoticed.]

The novel’s ending is quite illustrative in this regard. Matilda remains in La Castañeda for twenty-eight years and, at the end of her life, she writes a series of oficios diplómaticos [diplomatic notes], letters addressed to different authorities denouncing, in a style that mimics the language of medical records, some of the abuses taking place in La Castañeda. The ending combines Matilda’s death record with her voice coming back from the grave: “Déjenme descansar en paz” 45 [Let me rest in peace]. What is the actual message this ghost wants to give in her last intervention from the grave? It certainly refers to the endless ways in which her subjectivity has been intervened, regulated, controlled over the years. But Matilda’s ultimate call for peace additionally reveals the limits of literary representation, the survival of a voice that can only exist mediated by others. This specter—neither dead nor alive—is the ultimate challenge to fiction for, as in photographs, literature brings to life a reality that otherwise would be forever lost by paradoxically freezing it into a the permanent death of representation. Memory as an interrupted, spaced, fragmented process reveals the voids that turn historical reconstruction into an almost impossible task. In a way, Nadie me verá llorar can be read as the ultimate critique to the genre of historical fiction. Indeed, if the past truly is a foreign country, as British novelist L. P. Hartley famously asserts, 46 it is certainly the novelist and the historian’s calling to rediscover it from afar. Nadie me verá llorar poses, however, that the past is the terra incognita left to be mapped in the disciplinary world of history that pretends to believe in the total transparency of the archive. As such, Nadie me verá llorar is what Francine Masiello calls a “creative ruination,” 47 representing the unfinished nature of trauma, a narra-

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tive built over the ruins of history, a collective memory of crumbling walls. Located in a paradoxical temporality and in a liminal and spectral space between the “now” and “then,” life and death, narrative language transforms into a fragile diglossia, “a grammar of double voicing, loaded with double meaning.” 48 Nadie me verá llorar suggests that all that is left to the historian’s avid imagination is a world in ruins: the remains of those disappeared—and yet paradoxically trapped alive—in the ruins of the archive. VISUAL SNAPSHOTS: MEMORY AND MODERNITY Nadie me verá llorar reenacts what Idelver Avelar calls the “untimely past” of allegory, a past that “reclaims the vitality of time.” 49 Each voice heard in the novel, either as a brief voice-over in criminal records, or as the extended life narrative of Matilda Burgos, carries what Avelar calls the “seeds of time”: the potential for a new return with expanded narrative possibilities. 50 The novel reveals an “allegorical way of seeing” that shows “everything about history that, from the very beginning has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful.” 51 Fundamentally, the novel involves the reader both at the visual and narrative level: it leads into an allegorical way of reading that resembles what Benjamin calls the “artisan form of communication” of storytelling. Stories have a capacity to integrate themselves into the listener’s experience by claiming a place into his or her memory, therefore integrating into their own experiences. 52 Genuine storytelling recreates a world that otherwise is forever lost, an art that is disappearing in modern times. Although Rivera Garza’s novel does not resolve this challenge, she experiments on the possibilities of such allegorical way of seeing/reading for a politics of memory in Latin America. A specter is always a “revenant,” Derrida states, for “one cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.” 53 Nadie me verá llorar explores narrative structures that are iterative, as they show the recurrence of trauma in collective consciousness. Can this endless intromission of the spectral in our shared social space ever finish? Nadie me verá llorar seems to suggest that no door will ever contain its return. NOTES 1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 221. 2. Walter Benjamin, in Illuminations, 220. 3. Boris Kossoy, “Photography in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The European Experience and the Exotic Experience,” in Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America, 1866–1994 ed. Wendy Watriss and Lois Parkinson Zamora (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 31.

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4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 14. 5. Cristina Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar (México, DF: CONACULTA, INBA, Tusquets Editores México, 1999; repr., 3rd ed., Barcelona: Tusquets, 2003); Cristina Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, trans. Andrew Hurley,(Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 2003). 6. Cristina Rivera Garza’s historical research on medical files at the archive of the General Insane Asylum in Mexico impacts this novel on many levels. One fundamental aspect of the connection between history and fiction has to do with writing: “The writing and reading of history goes well beyond an academic interest for me. I do have training as a historian, holding a PhD from the University of Houston. I appreciate history as writing. Creative writing, that is. There are two moments that link, in my mind, history and literature together: the moment in which the researcher enters the archive with only a vague idea of what she is looking for, full of anticipation; and the moment in which the reading of the found document, the document the researcher did not necessarily know she was looking for, signals an appropriation. Which could be both subversion and betrayal. Both moments are moments of our rubbing with language” (Caitlin Fehin, “An Interview with Mexico’s Cristina Rivera Garza.,” Belletrista 5 [2010], n.p., http://www.belletrista.com/2010/issue5/features_1.php [accessed March 3, 2015]). 7. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 114. 8. Magdalena Perkowska defines “photo-textuality” as the exploration of the complex dynamics between photography and narration. She distinguishes a “photo-texuality” from other formats combining photographs and text, such as collaborations between photographers and novelists, or fiction illustrated by photographs. Compared to these examples, “photo-textuality” engages in a metafictional reflection about the connections between literature and photography, a trait also present in Nadie me verá llorar (Perkowska, Pliegues visuales: Narrativa y fotografia en la novela latinoamericana contemporánea [Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2013]). 9. Countermemory is a term associated with oral histories: “Often countermemory resided in finding blemishes in the official narrative of history or even in one’s own life. . . . Countermemory was not merely a collection of alternative facts and texts but also an alternative way of reading by using ambiguity, irony, doublespeak, and private intonation that challenged the official bureaucratic and political discourse.” (Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia [New York: Basic Books, 2001], 61–62). 10. Cristina Rivera Garza, “The Criminalization of the Syphilitic Body: Prostitutes, Health Crimes, and Society in Mexico City, 1867–1930,” in Crime and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society since Late Colonial Times, ed. Ricardo D. Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert M. Joseph (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 172. 11. This is the complete “official description” of Matilda: “Esta enferma observa buena conducta. Le gusta trabajar, es dedicada y tiene buen carácter. La enferma habla mucho, ésta es su excitación” (Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 12) [Patient demonstrates good conduct. Likes to work; is dedicated and good-humored. Talks a great-dea; that is the symptom of patient’s excitation] (Rivera Garza, “Preface,” in No One Will See Me Cry, trans. Hurley, n.p.). Rivera Garza’s use of the fictionalized medical record in this example establishes a further contrast between the official and fictional representations of Matilda. 12. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 12; Rivera Garza, “Preface,” in No One Will See Me Cry, by Rivera Garza, n.p. 13. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deule et la Nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993), interpreted in Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and the Return of the Dead (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 84. 14. Derrida, Spectres (1993), as interpreted by Davis, Haunted Subjects, 84. 15. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2nd ed. 2008), 8. 16. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 7. 17. Elizabeth Jelin, “La fotografía en la investigación social: Algunas reflexiones personales,” Memoria y Sociedad 16, no. 33 (July–December 2012): 66.

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18. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 64. 19. Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 62. 20. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 64; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 62. 21. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 4. Imagetexts are present in Latin American literary and artistic creations since the Avant-gardes. From Jorge Luis Borges ultraísta poetic experimentations in Cuaderno de San Martín or Fervor de Buenos Aires to Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, Latin American writers have experimented with the possibilities of a literature that breaches the distance between visual and linguistic elements. 22. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 95. 23. In another essay, “The Storyteller,” Benjamin regrets the loss of the “living immediacy” of the storyteller, an immediacy created by the “old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand” (Illuminations, 108). In such definition, narration ties the bonds with lived experience in a way that writing could never fully accomplish. Benjamin’s words are very close to those of W. J. T. Mitchell when defining the imagetext. Rivera Garza’s fiction can be defined also along these lines, as the ultimate attempt to make literature a live text. 24. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 9. 25. Susan Sontag, Sobre la fotografía, trans. Carlos Gardini and Aurelio Major (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006), 32. 26. Frederico Gamboa, Santa (Barcelona: Talleres Araluce, 1903). 27. Rivera Garza, “The Criminalization of the Syphilitic Body,” 172. 28. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University or Massachusetts Press, 1988), 36–37. 29. Rosalind E. Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 10th ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 107. 30. Laura M. Kanost, “Pasillos sin luz: Reading the Asylum in Nadie me verá llorar by Cristina Rivera Garza,” Hispanic Review 76, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 303. 31. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar (2003), 140; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 153. 32. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar (2003), 147; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 160–61. 33. Vicky Unruh, Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America: Intervening Acts (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 6. 34. Unruh, Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America, 16. 35. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 77; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 78. 36. Derrida, Spectres (1994), 34, quoted in Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 37. 37. Davis, Haunted Subjects, 88. 38. Davis, Haunted Subjects, 76. 39. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 86-87; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 89. 40. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 37; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 30. 41. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 37; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 30. 42. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 132–33; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 144. 43. Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 145. This relationship between photography, feminization and consumerism is most evident in the case of pornography. It is important to remember that the novel begins with descriptions of Joaquín looking through different stereoscopic images of naked women and reflecting on the possibility of detaining time by regarding them (Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar [2003], 17). 44. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 193; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 215. 45. Rivera Garza, Nadie me verá llorar, 205; Rivera Garza, No One Will See Me Cry, 229. 46. L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: New York Review Books Classics, [original 1953]; repr. 2002) 45. 47. Francine Masiello, “Scribbling on the Wreck,” in Telling Ruins in Latin America, ed. Michael J. Lazzara and Vicky Unruh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 29. 48. Masiello, “Scribbling on the Wreck,” 30.

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49. Idelver Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 19. 50. Avelar, The Untimely Present, 20. 51. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1996), 166. 52. Benjamin, Illuminations, 91. 53. Derrida, Specters (1994), 10–11, quoted in Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 2nd ed. (2008), 11; emphasis in the original.

IV

Invisible Hands: Specters of the Market Economy

Since its earlier theoretical formulations, the association of capital processes to invisibility or imperceptibility emphasizes a mysterious or spectral character in market transactions. Adam Smith’s model of capitalism is based on the free-ranging operations of a metaphorical “invisible hand.” Karl Marx observed how workers’ self-commodification generates goods with a surplus value that transcends their use value. Consumption economy has evolved in a way in which individuals are no longer defined in terms of their work, but either through the possession and use of goods subject to obsolescence or through access to consumable experiences. The expendable and the temporary underscore the evanescent, phantasmatic character of the consumerist experience. In a manner analogous to its mythical “invisible hand,” free-market politics moves in the direction of governing individuals through laws unknown to them. Along with invisibility and esoterism, the combination of defacement, dispossession, and exclusion of the masses is an integral part of this system. Market economy boasts a marked aspirational character based on media-manufactured desires and values, as well as a multiplicity of possible worlds and experiences; those subjects or communities that do not manifest the patterns of success, well-being or mastery of oneself profiled by the market see themselves excluded by this system. The commons are assaulted in the name of the supposed efficiency of private management and global standardization—which is not an impediment to revert them to state control or turning them into a publicly shared liability after episodes of gross, and

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often self-interested, mismanagement by the heroes of the neoliberal narrative. Therefore, massive dispossession is consubstantial to market expansion. 1 Notwithstanding the possible benefits of capital expansion for later generations (the much-touted creative destructions of capitalism), people frequently live under invisible and distant threats, frequently exposed to the shock of manufactured crises while inside a system that claims to privilege and reward individual liberties and freedom of choice. In this context, any political aspirations opposed to dominant paradigms become increasingly branded as terrorist or antisystemic, while any alternative ethics to the individualistic paradigm are caricaturized and placed beyond the restrictive moral frontier of self-care and volunteerism as a broadcastable experience. The chapters chosen for this portion of the volume emphasize different aspects of the spectral character of modern capitalism: the fetishization of raw goods in an export economy, in which a certain commodity comes to stand for development and modernity; self-alienation in the neoliberal moral paradigm; and exclusion and simulacra as manifestations of the spectral in modern capitalism. We commence this section with a compelling re-examination of one of the foundational novels of modern Venezuelan narrative in Juan Pablo Lupi’s “Cubagua’s Ghosts.” By stressing the unique geohistorical circumstances during which the novel was written, Lupi shows how the hallucinatory trip to the past and the theme of the specter serve to link the colonial enterprise to the birth of the petrostate. Lupi considers that Enrique Bernardo Núñez’s novel, published in 1931, (re)incorporates into the narrative portions of the historical archive that are missing from institutionalized discourses of history, thus establishing this tale as a ghostly haunting of the ills of (neo)colonialism and historical amnesia. Moving to more recent literature, in “Portraits of the Walking Dead: Transgressing Genres and (In)visible Demographics in Maurice Echeverría,” María del Carmen Caña Jiménez focuses on Diccionario esotérico (2006), one of the more challenging works of the new generation of Central American novelists of the current century. Her chapter explores how neoliberalism as economic war “has been domesticated by the practices of subnational diegetic actors.” Her approach goes beyond traditional readings that locate the spectral as a narrative strategy that demands closure of mysteries and enigmas of an unresolved past, becoming instead an eschatology where the spectral rematerializes in a tangible space where dead organisms “exist simultaneously with the breathing body.” 2 Victoria L. Garrett and Edward M. Chauca analyze the spectral quality of the power dynamics of neoliberalism in “Haunting Capitalism: Biutiful, the Specter, and Fantasies of the Global Market.” According to the authors, Biutiful (2010) exposes the specters that haunt the dominant power structure: undocumented workers, political exiles, the spiritual world, and the gray market, represented through both ghosts and living characters. Their chapter examines the characters’ precarious existence as an indictment on the short-

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comings of the current political and economic status quo. Moving on to analyze the spectral nature of the power structure of late global capitalism, the authors argue that globalized capitalism haunts the characters through insatiable fantasies and consumerist desires that manifest themselves through repetitive simulacra. NOTES 1. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. See pages 209–10.

Chapter Ten

Cubagua’s Ghosts Juan Pablo Lupi

Si fuera posible que los muertos surgieran de la tumba oiríamos a los unos contar sus desventuras, sus dolores, su martirio, y gozar al verse libres de las persecuciones de los hombres; oiríamos a los otros confesar las infamias de que fueron actores en la vida, y entristecerse al no poder continuarlas en los abismos de la muerte. —Arístides Rojas, “La primera colonia en aguas de Venezuela, 1498–1550” 1 [If it were possible that the dead rise from the grave we would hear some of them tell their misadventures, their pain, their martyrdom, and rejoice upon seeing themselves free from the persecution of men; we would hear others confess to the wicked acts they committed in life, and grow sad as they cannot go on perpetrating them in the chasms of death.] —“The First Colonial Settlement on Venezuelan Waters, 1498–1550”

“Un pueblo sin anales, sin memoria del pasado, sufre ya una especie de muerte. O viene a ser como aquella tribu que solo andaba por el agua para no dejar sus huellas. A pesar del número de sus cultivadores puede decirse que ignoramos la propia historia” 2 [A people without annals, without memory of the past, already suffers from a kind of death. Or comes to be like that tribe that only walked over water so as to leave no trace. In spite of the number of its practitioners we can say that we ignore our history proper]. When the Venezuelan journalist, writer and historian Enrique Bernardo Núñez (1895–1964) pronounced these words on June 24, 1948, in his induction into the National Academy of History, Venezuela was experiencing a momentous time in its history. The 1945 Revolución de Octubre seemed to have put an end to more than one century of military rule and opened the path for a democratic and civilian government. In December 1947 Rómulo Gallegos, the renowned novelist and presidential candidate for the Acción Democrática 169

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party, had won the first free and direct elections in the history of Venezuela. The democratic experiment lasted only a few months. On November 1948 a military coup toppled Gallegos, and military rule resumed for another decade. There was something prescient in those gloomy words Núñez had pronounced just a few months before the coup. The recurrence of militarism in Venezuela is one of those ills inseparable from historical amnesia. Another is the country’s complicated relationship with la tierra—a general category that symbolically encompasses things like land, landscape, race, national identity, and, of course, oil. Large-scale oil exploitation began in 1915, at the time of Juan Vicente Gómez dictatorship (1908–1935). Enrique Bernardo Núñez had witnessed Venezuela’s passage from a rural society to a petrostate—arguably the only petrostate in the West. One cannot exaggerate how drastically and fast Venezuelan society changed. These transformations, and the specter of neocolonialism lurking behind the massive influx of foreign capital, were topics that obsessed Núñez. The novel Cubagua (1931) is perhaps Enrique Bernardo Núñez’s most elaborate reflection on these preoccupations. 3 Although it has received relatively little attention abroad, Cubagua is widely regarded as a key work of the Venezuelan literary canon. History, colonialism, and temporality (understood as the experience of time, not as a synonym of time) are the main structural and thematic components of the novel. Aspects that have attracted much commentary include the treatment of myth and the marvelous, and the use of modernist narrative techniques that anticipate the Latin American Boom novels. 4 Cubagua appeared at about the same time as the influential classics Doña Bárbara (1929) by Rómulo Gallegos and Las lanzas coloradas [The Red Lances] (1931) by Arturo Úslar Pietri, and stands in sharp contrast with them. 5 Despite the political differences between Gallegos and Úslar, both novels draw on the positivist idea of history as a linear progress, and conform to a nationalist historiography predicated on the ideals of freedom and progress through civilization: the struggle for peace and emancipation that had begun in the early nineteenth century continues, and can eventually reach its goal through the vanquishing of backwardness, racial conflict, and institutional anomy. Cubagua, on the other hand, “negates” 6 these modernizing fictions. Núñez’s novel displaces the civilizing narrative to present a hallucinatory, and ultimately pessimistic, vision of historical stasis through the appropriation of historical texts, myth, and fantasy. Cubagua is an inhospitable islet with a surface area of barely 24 km2 located south of the island of Margarita. Although it has been a deserted island for more than four centuries, its importance during the first years of the Conquest cannot be overstated. It was the main center of pearl fishing at the time and effectively became one of the richest commercial hubs of the nascent Spanish Empire from 1520 until the second half of the 1530s, when

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the oyster beds were completely depleted. 7 The Spanish settlement, officially incorporated in 1528 under the name of Nueva Cádiz and destroyed in 1541, possibly by an earthquake, was the first city of what today is Venezuela. In this chapter I will explore how Cubagua represents Venezuela’s traumatic— yet unacknowledged as such—relationship with la tierra and history as a scene of haunting. In Cubagua the nascent Venezuelan petrostate is literally haunted by the remote colonial past. I further argue that the novel’s response to this experience is the invention of an alternative, parahistorical phantasmagoria that aims to recall and critically recognize that destructive past and its persistence in modernity. The novel explicitly mentions the fantasma as a chief element of its hallucinatory atmosphere. Núñez’s ghostly fiction is guided not by generic prescriptions but by what María del Pilar Blanco characterizes as “the experience of perceiving specific locations.” 8 Cubagua’s phantasmagoria, as I will show, is mediated and brought about by the intervention of the ghost, and its purpose is to counter both the colonial past and what Enrique Bernardo Núñez sees as the repetition of the colonial past—the petrostate. 9 Cubagua begins in 1925, in La Asunción, capital of the island of Margarita. The protagonist, Ramón Leiziaga, an engineer from Caracas, is sent to the island of Cubagua. Although he is Venezuelan and works for the government, he is modeled after the neocolonial type of the greedy foreign oilman. He travels accompanied by various characters; the most important are Fray Dionisio, a Franciscan priest, and Nila Cálice, a mysterious woman of indigenous ancestry. Once Leiziaga is on the island, two strange things happen. The first is an uncanny flashback—time travel? hallucination? ghostly intervention?—to the beginning of the sixteenth century, when Cubagua was in the midst of the pearl fishing boom and was populated by conquistadors, merchants, adventurers, and Indian and black slaves. Strangely, some of the characters roaming the deserted island in 1925, including Leiziaga himself, are the doubles of characters—some of them historical—living in Nueva Cádiz four centuries before. The second event is a phantasmatic trip in which Leiziaga meets a mythical being called Vocchi and witnesses an areyto or magical indigenous dance. The narrative is ambiguous as to whether Leiziaga is dreaming, hallucinating, or actually attending this marvelous ceremony. At the end of the novel Leiziaga returns to Margarita. Nobody believes his story and he is put in jail after being accused of smuggling pearls. He manages to escape and takes a ship that goes to the Orinoco River. 10 At the risk of being schematic, it is possible to identify three different realms or “times” coexisting in the novel: the present, which corresponds to Leiziaga’s stay in Cubagua and Margarita in the year 1925, and is also the era of Juan Vicente Gómez’s dictatorship and the beginning of the oil industry; the past, which corresponds to Cubagua during the pearl boom in the early sixteenth century; and what can be characterized as a mythical and hallucina-

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tory world, which corresponds to the encounter with Vocchi. These three realms are connected and, as will be shown, the intervention of the ghost is precisely what interweaves them. The parallels between the present and the past begin to appear when the group is approaching the island by boat. The guide Antonio Cedeño informs Leiziaga that there is oil in the island. Leiziaga then fantasizes like a conquistador, comparing Columbus’s encounter with “indias adornadas de perlas” [Indian women adorned with pearls] with his own vision of Cubagua “llena de gente arrastrada por la magia del aceite. Factorías, torres, grúas enormes, taladros y depósitos grises: ‘Standard Oil Co. 503’” 11 [full of people drawn by the magic of oil. Factories, towers, tall cranes, drills, and gray containers: “Standard Oil Co. 503”] 12 Leiziaga inspects the desolation of the island and the few remains of what had been the town of Nueva Cádiz four centuries ago. This is the setting of the exchanges with Fray Dionisio, who will turn out to be the ghostly mediator between the “here” and the “beyond.” He is a mysterious Franciscan priest who is said to be a protector of the Indians, practices strange rituals with a skull, and bears a name rich in connotations such as paganism, sensuality, and hedonism. Amid the ruins, Fray Dionisio begins to talk with Leiziaga and acquires an eerie presence; he becomes “más alto, más flaco, próximo a convertirse en un montón de ceniza” 13 [taller, thinner, about to become a mound of ash]. Their exchange presents a sharp contrast between the priest’s insistence on talking about the past—his life among the Indians, the city of Nueva Cádiz, and “lo que ha sido y es hace trescientos, hace miles de años” 14 [everything that is and has been for three hundred, for thousands of years]—and Leiziaga’s historical amnesia and indifference toward the past. Fray Dionisio points to a ring Leiziaga is wearing and keeps as a token of his lineage 15—we learn that Leiziaga is a descendant of the conquistadors that battled the Indians before the foundation of Caracas and of the Basque merchants of the Compañía Guipuzcoana. In Fray Dionisio’s eyes the ring functions as a metonymy of the colonial past, and more specifically, of its violence and exploitation. 16 For his part Leiziaga is unaware of this aspect of his own history and merely repeats it in his obsession with oil and modernity. Fray Dionisio then decides to teach Leiziaga a history lesson—an uncanny one. He takes Leiziaga inside a ruined house where he keeps navigation instruments, old maps, documents, ceramics, and books, including a copy of François de Pons’s Voyage à la partie orientale de la terre-ferme (1806), which refers to the pearl industry in Cubagua. 17 At this point Fray Dionisio becomes a spectral figure—“se vuelve borroso en la penumbra. Sus ojos se hunden mientras habla lentamente. A veces diríase que ha muerto” 18 [he becomes blurry in the half-darkness. His eyes cave in while he speaks slowly. Sometimes one might say that he has died]. He tells Leiziaga about the Milanese nobleman Luis de Lampugnano, a historical figure who lived in

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Cubagua and invented a dredge for collecting pearls. This machine would have rendered the manual labor of Indians and slaves obsolete. 19 Fray Dionisio adds that Leiziaga bears a certain similarity with Lampugnano: like the Milanese count centuries ago, Leiziaga is also in Cubagua just searching for riches. But in the end, says Fray Dionisio, all those who have been looking for wealth inevitably miss “el secreto de la tierra” 20 [the secret of the land]. Immediately after hearing Fray Dionisio, Leiziaga then wonders: “¿Sería él acaso el mismo Lampugnano?” 21 [Is he (i.e., Leiziaga), perhaps, Lampugnano himself?]. As it turns out, he is. The following chapter visits the town of Nueva Cádiz four centuries earlier: “Las casas eran altas, macizas, como fuertes. . . . Él tenía la misma estatura; pero la barba rubia, los ojos azules” 22 [The houses were tall, solid, strong. . . . He had the same height, but blond beard, blue eyes]. The narrative suggests that the character of Leiziaga is reappearing, but in another historical time and place, and with a different face. Readers immediately learn that Leiziaga is the Milanese count Luis de Lampugnano, now bankrupt and despised by the colonizers of the island as the inventor of the machine that would have given him control over the pearl industry. We also learn that the Indians on the mainland have rebelled: they have destroyed the convents in Cumaná and Chichiriviche, killed the priests and are now about to invade the island. 23 The inhabitants of Cubagua flee but Lampugano remains hiding on the island. He sees the piraguas [canoes] of the invading Indians approaching the shore. One of the boats displays an uncanny trophy: “En una piragua dos manos cortadas sangran. Dos manos blancas. Una cabeza parece dormir aún en la dulzura del aire. La cabeza es la de Fray Dionisio, fraile menor de la observancia” 24 [In one canoe two cut hands bleed. Two white hands. A head still seems to be asleep amid the sweetness of the air. The head is Fray Dionisio’s, a minor friar of the Order]. The ghostly nature of Fray Dionisio is revealed: He was one of the priests killed in the 1520 revolt, and he is also the priest who in 1925 accompanies Leiziaga to Cubagua in order to show him—spell? hallucination? time travel?—the life of Cubagua during the pearl boom of the early sixteenth century, and that he is the double or repetition of the greedy adventurer and engineer Luis de Lampugnano. 25 The rest of the chapter is an account of the life and history of Nueva Cádiz until it was abandoned and destroyed in 1541. The novel makes direct reference to historical events like Gonzalo de Ocampo’s expedition against the Indians in 1521, the reconstruction of Nueva Cádiz, the attack by French pirates in 1528, the rule of Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo (1532–1533), and describes in graphic detail the horrifying abuses that Indians and black slaves had to endure. Núñez’s reconstruction of Nueva Cádiz was likely based in part on the chronicle “La primera colonia en aguas de Venezuela, 1498–1550” [The First Colonial Settlement on Venezuelan Waters,

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1498–1550] by the renowned Venezuelan historian, journalist and physician Arístides Rojas (1826–1894). 26 Sources that document the history of Cubagua and that both Rojas and Núñez knew well include the chronicles of Bartolomé de Las Casas, Girolamo Benzoni’s Storia del Mondo Nuovo (1565), Fray Pedro de Aguado’s Noticias historiales relativas a Santa Marta, el Nuevo Reino de Granada y Venezuela (1581–1582), and Juan de Castellanos’s Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias (1588) (Castellanos lived in Nueva Cádiz shortly before its destruction). However, in the novel the imaginary recreation of Lampugnano and the Indians is no less relevant than the references to historical facts. The Spaniards eventually return to the island. Lampugano tries to make ends meet as a pharmacist, but is caught stealing money and is imprisoned with a group of black slaves. Inside the prison Lampugano encounters Arimuy, a fierce Indian warrior who had been part of the revolt in the mainland. Arimuy plays music with a small cane and gives a lyrical speech about a female figure called Zenquerot and the separation of the enslaved men from their women. 27 Lampugano and the other prisoners are enthralled by the music and words of Arimuy, and the black slaves shout that he is the only one who can set them free. Arimuy, however, responds “con aire altanero y melancólico:—El que quiera su libertad que la conquiste” 28 [with an air of haughtiness and melancholia:—whoever wants freedom has to conquer it]. The meeting between Lampugnano and Arimuy and the theme of melancholia anticipate Leiziaga’s encounter with Vocchi later in the novel. The oppression of Indians is syncretically conflated with that of Black slaves, who see the Indian warrior as their liberator. However, waging war against the oppressor was futile in the end. What Lampugnano and the slaves hear from Arimuy is fictionalized in the novel as the voice of the oppressed, unmediated by history. This can be read as a momentary apparition of the haunting presence that stands in opposition to historical discourse, all the more so insofar as this episode takes place precisely in the most “historical” of all the chapters in the novel. The chapter concludes with the eventual downfall of Cubagua. Pedro Ortiz de Matienzo forces Lampugnano to help him murder his rival Diego de Ordaz. Lampugnano eventually commits suicide, and Nueva Cádiz is finally destroyed “by storms and earthquakes.” 29 This cataclysm brings the reader back to the present: La ciudad quedó abandonada y el mar sepultó sus escombros. Quisieron hacer una ciudad de piedra y levantaron apenas unas ruinas. Cardones. La voz de fray Dionisio suena con un eco: Laus Deo. — ¿Has comprendido, Leiziaga, todo lo que ha pasado aquí? ¿Interpretas este silencio? Fray Dionisio se paseó el pañuelo por la frente, por aquella calvicie, remate de una cabeza que parecía desterrada.

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Pero no importa, piensa Leiziaga. Las expediciones vuelven a poblar las costas. Se tiene permiso para introducir centenares de negros y taladros a Cubagua. Indios, europeos, criollos, vendedores de toda especie se hacinan en viviendas estrechas. Traen un cine. Se elevan torres de acero. . . . Los buques rápidos con sus penachos de humo recuerdan las velas de las naos. 30 [The city was left abandoned and the sea buried its rubble. They wanted to make a city of stone and they barely raised a few ruins. Cactuses. Fray Dionisio’s voice sounds with an echo: Laus Deo. —Have you understood, Leiziaga, everything that has happened here? Do you interpret this silence? Fray Dionisio rubbed his forehead with a cloth, a baldness rounding off a head that looked as if banished. But it doesn’t matter, thinks Leiziaga. Expeditions settle in the shores again. Bringing hundreds of blacks and drills to Cubagua is authorized. Indians, Europeans, creoles, salespeople of all kind are crowded in narrow residences. They bring a film projector. Towers of steel rise up. . . . Fast vessels with their tufts of smoke recall the sails of the Spanish ships.]

The passage expresses what is arguably the central ethical and theoretical question posed in the novel: “Have you understood, Leiziaga, everything that happened here? Do you interpret this silence?” Through Fray Dionisio’s ghostly mediation Leiziaga was able to witness the past and to recognize Lampugnano as his own double. Once Leiziaga “experiences” the past and then returns to the present, Fray Dionisio expects him to realize that he viewed and heard things from the past but that were “silenced” and have remained so ever since. In other words, Fray Dionisio compels Leiziaga to realize that the present is being haunted by a traumatic past. The aim of Cubagua, and more specifically, the aim of the novel understood as a hauntography, as I will explain below, is precisely to “interpret” this “silence.” The “silence” Fray Dionisio talks about is the repressed trauma and persistence of colonialism and exploitation. These ills return to the present under the cloak of the nascent oil industry, but this is acknowledged neither as trauma nor as return of the ghosts of the past precisely because such ills have been forgotten and are not part of the received understanding of history. Tellingly, Leiziaga’s “it doesn’t matter” signals that at that moment Fray Dionisio’s mission is not yet fulfilled, for Leiziaga’s proleptic vision of the “modern” landscape of the island—with its oil towers and immigrant workers—is a mere repetition of Nueva Cádiz four centuries earlier. The reflection that stems from the temporal transits between 1925 and the early sixteenth century brings us to the third realm I referred to earlier—that of myth. In Cubagua myth is not necessarily something that aims to replace history or stand for a more “authentic” mode of cultural and historical identity. The purpose of myth, as will be shown, is both more modest and more complicated. Myth permeates almost every aspect of the novel. Fray Dioni-

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sio—the Franciscan missionary-shaman-Greek god—is a ghost syncretically endowed with various mythical attributes. He mediates not only between the present and the past but also between the present—and Leiziaga’s self in particular—and other forms of alterity. Nila Cálice and Vocchi are representatives of such forms, but unlike Lampugano, who belongs to the realm of history, they are placed in the realm of myth. The character of Nila Cálice is a fascinating postcolonial pastiche. At the beginning of the novel we learn that in the town of La Asunción, Nila is both the object of male desire 31 and a motive of scandal because she lives with the priest Fray Dionisio and is also rumored to have a lesbian relationship. 32 She accompanies the group to Cubagua and Leiziaga, just like the other men, becomes fixated on her. Nila is said to be the daughter of Rimarima, a cacique that was murdered by merchants of natural rubber in the Orinoco River. Fray Dionisio took care of her as a child and she avenged the death of her father thanks to her prowess in the use of the bow and arrow 33 (the allusion to the Greek myth of the Amazons is clear). But then Fray Dionisio told her that “[e]ra preciso poseer la fuerza del enemigo, conocer el misterio de la máquina” 34 [it was necessary to possess the force of the enemy, to know the mystery of the machine] and sends her to Europe and North America, where she attends Princeton University. 35 Once there she mocks colonial power by consciously fashioning herself as an exotic Other in accordance to the fantasies of the “imperial eyes”: Los profesores le parecían ridículos en su seriedad, confiados ciegamente en su ciencia que le parecía a ella una fantasía maravillosa. Sabía que no podrían explicar ciertas cosas suyas y los deslumbraba con sus perlas, sus labios pintados, sus relatos. Les hablaba de monstruos que obedecen a los piaches, milagros que alucinan con la magia de una luz perdida, y de sus antepasados en cuyos festines funerarios hacían sacrificios humanos. . . . Camino del Orinoco salieron entomólogos, mineros, arqueólogos, aventureros, geógrafos. Muchos no volvían. Algunos compraban flechas e ídolos y publicaban a su regreso noticias sobre los tamanacos o los maroas que nunca vieron. Así alinearon centenares de objetos en las vitrinas de los museos. 36 [The professors looked ridiculous to her, with all their seriousness, blindly self-assured by their science, which she deemed a marvelous fantasy. She knew that they couldn’t explain certain things about her and she dazzled them with her pearls, her painted lips, her tales. She told them about monsters who obey the commands of the Indian sorcerers, about miracles that produce hallucinations with the magic of a lost light, and about her ancestors who celebrated human sacrifices in their funereal rites. . . . Entomologists, miners, archaeologists, adventurers, geographers marched on their way to the Orinoco. Many didn’t come back. Some bought arrows and idols, and upon their return published observations about the Tamanaco and Maroa tribes they never saw. Thus they lined up hundreds of objects in the museum exhibits.]

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Nila Cálice performs the reification of both male and ethnographic desire to the point of parody and subversion. The thesis (O’Gorman, Pagden) that America is a European invention, a place that only made sense to the colonizers once they projected their own preconceptions, categories, and fantasies, is here pushed to an extreme. 37 The “Other” deliberately crafts a simulacrum ready for the consumption of the male colonizer-ethnographer. In this fashion, the logic behind the ethnographer’s gaze (the projection of Westerncolonial desires onto the exotic Other) becomes a form of haunting from the moment that the objects he consumes are revealed as forgeries and simulacra. In this regard, Nila Cálice is the flip side of the relationship between colonizer and colonized represented in the chapter about Nueva Cádiz—this relationship is not just one of destruction and exploitation but also of desire. Nila Cálice subverts the colonial gaze behind the writing of much of the history of the New World. Chapter 5, “Vocchi,” is separate from the events narrated in the novel. It is presented as a fragment of an old manuscript found in a convent in La Asunción and tells about the life of a mythical being called Vocchi. This figure is based on Vochi or Uochí, brother of Amalivac (also spelled as Amalivaca or Amaliwak), the father of mankind in the mythology of the Tamanaco Indians. The story of Amalivac is one of the most important native legends of Venezuela. It was recorded by the Jesuit missionary Filippo Salvatore Gilii in his Saggio di storia americana (1781) and by Alexander von Humboldt in his travel diaries in the Orinoco, and then incorporated to the national archive proper by Arístides Rojas, who included the story in his compilation Leyendas históricas (1890). 38 For Gilii and Humboldt the legend of Amalivac and Vochi had a special interest given its similarities with the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha and other “Great Flood” myths. In chapter 5 of Cubagua, Núñez himself does not lose the opportunity to engage in the game of comparative ethnography and adds some surprising elements to the legend. According to the manuscript, Vocchi was born in Lanka—the island of Hindu mythology—and from there he traveled to Mesopotamia, Greece, and finally to a fantastic city that was flooded. There he joins his brother Amalivac and both create humankind anew. Vocchi then returns to his native land but when he gets there he finds out it no longer exists. He decides to go back with the men and women he had created, only to find that they had been invaded by other peoples from a faraway land: “Vestían horribles armaduras. Eran sucios, groseros y malvados” 39 [They wore horrifying armors. They were filthy, rude and evil]. Fray Dionisio had shown Leiziaga the Cubagua of the times of the Spanish conquest and his double Lampugnano; now it is the time to show him Vocchi. Fray Dionisio guides Leiziaga to his quarters, and his ghostly nature is confirmed once more. Inside the room Leiziaga spots “a mummified head” bearing the features of Fray Dionisio (this might be the same head that Lampugano-Leiziaga had seen four centuries earlier when the Indians raided

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the island; 40 and the reader also learns that Fray Dionisio was killed by an Indian named Orteguilla. 41 The ghost guides Leiziaga to an underground passage until they reach a room covered in gold and find Vocchi—“Su rostro espectral se inclinaba agobiado de perlas” 42 [His spectral face was bent, burdened by pearls]—wearing Leiziaga’s ring. Leiziaga then watches Nila Cálice and a group of Indians performing an areyto or ceremonial dance and telling stories about their ancestors in the presence of Vocchi. Once again, the narrative masterfully plays with ambiguity; it is uncertain whether Leiziaga is dreaming, hallucinating, or really attending a ceremony presided by Vocchi. The purpose of the episode is clear within the structure of the novel. In Cubagua, the ideals and values of progress and modernization—oil, machines, capital—are confronted both with the colonial past and with a return to primordial myths of generation. Myth offers neither salvation nor apocalyptic condemnation but intimates a revelation about the nature of history. The areyto expresses “melancholia” and this affect is reflected in Vocchi’s countenance. 43 Furthermore, the lives of the Indians were imbued with “nostalgia, pero no sabrían explicarla, acaso porque nunca pudieron volver a encontrarse. Nostalgia de la propia alma perdida. ¿No tiene también la Historia el mismo carácter?” 44 [nostalgia, but they wouldn’t know how to explain it, perhaps because they were never able to find themselves again. Nostalgia for the lost soul. Doesn’t History have the same character as well?]. This encounter between Vocchi and Leiziaga is a repetition of the earlier scene in which Lampugnano is imprisoned and listens to the warrior Arimuy, whose countenance also expressed melancholia. 45 The rhetorical question suggests that history and loss are inextricably related. A “nostalgia” that cannot be explained insofar as it is only acknowledged as loss and not as the loss of something identifiable or potentially recoverable—this is the nature of melancholia. 46 Therefore, the passage suggests that there is a spectral logic proper to history: the irretrievable object “returns” to haunt the present, and the outward manifestation can be two distinct symptoms—melancholia for the Indians, forgetfulness, indifference, and cynicism for a modern capitalist-technocrat like Leiziaga (or equivalently, for the elites of Gómez’s dictatorship in their partnership with foreign capital). Cubagua allegorizes this conception of history. The conclusion of the novel brings up the question of historical indifference and amnesia in these terms: Who writes history? Who owns it? What is believable as history? Coming out to the open after his encounter with Vocchi, Leiziaga finds the men in Cubagua hunting for pearls, just like four centuries before. He takes hold of the most valuable ones, but we learn that what motivates him is no longer their “material value” but that they stood for Nila Cálice’s “luminous grace.” 47 His greed is sublimated as the desire for the exotic female Other; he “forgets about oil, about the treasures buried in

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Cubagua” but “the image of Nila survives.” 48 However, the narrative complicates this outcome by focusing on how others appropriate Leiziaga’s own experience. He returns to Margarita and tells his story to Tiberio Mendoza, an amateur historian who lives in La Asunción. Upon listening to Leiziaga’s account of what he saw in the island, Mendoza judges Leiziaga to be “a monstrous raconteur of nonsense” 49 and replies: —Esas son fantasías, querido amigo. Cubagua es una isla inhabitable. Lea a Depons, a Rojas, a los cronistas de Indias. Venga a decirme absurdos—. Y añadió con solemnidad—: Además, además hay un alma indestructible de la raza. —¿Pero cuál es el alma de la raza?—pregunta Leiziaga—. ¿Es quizás la nostalgia, la gran tristeza del pueblo que se ignora a sí mismo, o son las almas superpuestas, vigilantes, para que ninguna cobre imperio sobre la otra? República, burocracia, todo les deja indiferentes. El negro y el indio toman la guitarra en sus manos del mismo modo que el rifle, cantan con una tristeza pueril y viven sin conocerse o se matan entre sí. 50 [—Those are fantasies, my dear friend. Cubagua is an inhospitable island. Read Depons, Rojas, the chroniclers of the Indies. Then come and talk nonsense—. And he added with a solemn tone—: And besides: besides there’s an indestructible soul of the race. —But what’s the soul of the race?—wondered Leiziaga—. Is it perhaps nostalgia, the great sadness of a people ignorant of its own self? Or is it the souls, superimposed and vigilant, so that one does not dominate and rule over the other? Republic, bureaucracy, everything leaves them indifferent. The Black and the Indian take the guitar in their hands just like the rifle, they sing with a childish sadness and live without knowing themselves or just kill each other.]

Two points are worth noting. The first is the recurrence of the motifs of nostalgia and ignorance. In an instant of lucidity—and precisely when his interlocutor Mendoza thinks he is insane—Leiziaga pessimistically wonders whether “the soul of the race” is after all nothing but a failure expressed by nostalgia and ignorance. The ideal alma de la raza would be civility and tolerance, but this is belied by history—civil wars followed Spanish colonialism throughout the nineteenth century, and then in the twentieth century, colonialism in the form of foreign oil exploitation followed war. The second point is that Leiziaga’s story is viewed as mere fancy and hence unreal. This introduces a rich metanarrative layer: for Tiberio Mendoza, Leiziaga’s account is nothing but a ghost story. Intrigued by Leiziaga’s account, Mendoza decides to pay him another visit to hear more about his experiences in the island. Mendoza does not find Leiziaga in his room (he had been detained by the police and sent to prison, accused of smuggling pearls), but he does find two very valuable items: the pearls and a manuscript

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in which Leiziaga had recorded his experiences. 51 Mendoza—the historian— steals both, and plagiarizes Leiziaga’s manuscript to write an article, aptly titled “Los fantasmas de Cubagua” [Cubagua’s Ghosts]: Temeroso de rectificaciones y de que se le tomase por un imaginativo, lo cual sería un eterno borrón en su fama de historiador, se limitaba a decir: “En ciertas noches, los pescadores creen ver unas sombras en las costas de la histórica isla. . . . Las imaginaciones sencillas dan todavía crédito a estas reminiscencias de antiguas leyendas, frutos del oscurantismo y del error.” . . . Aun cuando no tenía a la mano su biblioteca en el momento de escribir, el artículo “Los fantasmas de Cubagua” tuvo el mismo éxito inexplicable que alcanzaban siempre sus escritos. 52 [Afraid of corrections and that others would take him for a fantasizer—an eternal smear to his reputation as a historian—he limited himself to say: “On certain nights, fishermen believe they see shadows in the shores of the historical island. . . . Simple imaginations still give credence to those reminiscences from ancient legends, fruit of obscurantism and error.” . . . Even though he did not have his personal library at hand when he was writing, the article “Cubagua’s Ghosts” had the same unexplainable success his writings always had.]

Tiberio Mendoza draws a sharp distinction between, on the one hand, history as a discipline and his own practice and reputation as historian, and on the other hand, a story that even though it corresponds to a more genuine account of the past is ultimately deemed as legend and superstition. Or more precisely, as a ghost story. At another point Dr. Almozas, the physician of La Asunción, complains that people still believe “in legends and ghosts”; therefore “progress still has to fight against ignorance.” 53 This amounts to a metanarrative paradox linked to Núñez’s critique of national historiography and Venezuela’s relationship with its past. On the one hand, Leiziaga—incarnated in his double Lampugnano—witnesses and experiences the traumatic reality of colonial Cubagua and the “melancholic” cries of Indians and slaves. However, the truthfulness of his account is rejected altogether: it is not history but mere superstition, an imaginative ghost story. But on the other hand, Núñez opts to use the ghost precisely to inquire into what he calls “la propia historia,” to call attention to the ignored or forgotten truths that have been removed from conventional and established historiography—and the truth about history is summoned through the mediation of the ghost. Put in other words, Cubagua uses the ghostly to speak about “la propia historia,” yet “serious” historians don’t believe in ghosts. Ironically Núñez posits himself as one of those “fantasizers” [imaginativos] derided by Tiberio Mendoza, and this brings us to the question of hauntology. In his 1948 conference “Judgments on Venezuelan History” Núñez declares: “La historia escrita por razas dominadoras será siempre distinta a la interpretación que puedan darle los pueblos vencidos u oprimidos” 54 [Histo-

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ry as written by dominating races will always be different from the interpretation that defeated or oppressed peoples may give]. If coloniality didn’t end with Independence, 55 then national historiography is still inscribed by the colonial condition, and this has not been acknowledged. Núñez was dismayed to find that economy in modern Venezuela—and more precisely, the economy of natural resources—still remains “truer” than history, and perversely so. The technocratic imagination is inextricably tied to the petrostate. Núñez claims that, for economists, history exists only “en cifras” [in numbers] and for “esta clase de historiadores” [this class of historians] (i.e., economists and technocrats) Venezuela will always be nothing but “un país productor de petróleo” [an oil-producing country]. 56 Is it possible to conceive of an alternative, counter-colonial, interpretation of the nation, its past, and its relationship with la tierra? Núñez’s response comprises two aspects. The first is the recognition that something has been forgotten, repressed, or unacknowledged. In the novel this recognition arises from the experience of haunting. Fray Dionisio haunts Leiziaga, and Cubagua can be read as a political fable under the guise of a ghost story. Put in other terms, haunting is both a metaphor and a narrative device used to convey a countercolonial statement and, I would argue, a historiographical one as well. This brings me to the second aspect. Once it is recognized that something from the past (or perhaps the past as whole) has been unaccounted for, how is this “something” represented, evoked, or summoned? As has been shown, Fray Dionisio—the overdetermined Franciscan priest-pagan god-shaman-collector-historian—is the ghostly mediator between the present and the past, reality and myth, the world above and the underworld; because of him the neocolonial technocrat Leiziaga can travel across these different realms and experience the unknown “reality” of la propia historia. But, the question of how exactly the novel conveys this forgotten “reality” or “history” proper—how is it represented, what is it “made of”?—still needs to be answered. The issue here is mediation. From the perspective of Leiziaga the ghost mediates between “here” and “there,” but from the reader’s perspective, what mediates between “here” and “beyond”? How is haunting “written”? In short, what is Cubagua’s haunto-graphy? Cubagua is not a historical novel in the ordinary sense of the term. It does not aim, strictly speaking, to represent history or recount it under the guise of the novel form, or to retell history from an alternative point of view. Notwithstanding the various allusions to black slaves, indigenous peoples, their myths and culture, it is not the case that “the defeated or oppressed peoples” are the subjects of enunciation, or that the novel is engaged in recovering some form of ethnic and cultural authenticity (as, for example, the works of José María Arguedas or Alejo Carpentier in ¡Écue-Yamba-Ó!). Rather, what Núñez wrote can be characterized as a hauntological novel in which what he calls la propia historia is conjured up as a simulacrum. Núñez crafts a haun-

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tography with an assemblage of crónicas, European historical texts, travel narratives, accounts of myths, rituals, spectral apparitions, and images of conquistadors, Indians, and black slaves. After the absence or forgetting of history and the distancing from any anthropological intentionality, what remains is spectrality and fiction. Recall when Leiziaga “returns” from Nueva Cádiz to the present. Fray Dionisio asks him: “Have you understood, Leiziaga, everything that happened here? Do you interpret this silence?” 57 The novel does not indicate what Leiziaga’s “interpretation” is (in fact, the end of the novel is open: Leiziaga gets out of jail and returns to Cubagua). For Núñez, the way to “interpret” that “silence” is to concoct a phantasmagoria: Cubagua’s hauntography is Enrique Bernardo Núñez’s response to Fray Dionisio’s question. Unlike other haunting stories about historical trauma, in Cubagua the ghostly mediation is not carried out by testimonial accounts, objects, icons, or photographs. Rather, the medium between the “here” and the “beyond” is a heterogeneous discourse that conflates different modes of fictionality with materials drawn from a very specific historical and cultural archive. This simulacrum should not be understood as a representation of a “genuine” history. The purpose of the hauntography is not to represent or to imitate but to mediate. Just as the ghost mediates between the “here” and the “beyond,” hauntography—the writing of haunting in the novel—serves as mediator between us and la propia historia: it is a veritable montage of fiction, historical texts, exotic descriptions, apparitions, hallucinations, and mythical tales that serves to recognize and summon that which, in Núñez’s words, corresponds to what is “proper” to history. What the novel does is to display the return of this core as haunting, and this act in its turn is put into words and images as the hybrid discourse I have termed hauntography. 58 I have already pointed out the metanarrative paradox in which the ghost tale is simultaneously what is unbelievable and what renders the truth. Another paradox that becomes apparent upon looking closely at the novel’s hauntography is its peculiar amalgamation of fact and non-fact. On the one hand, the novel presents a self-conscious attention to historical sources and detail. For example, in the chapter on Nueva Cádiz the emphasis on historical factuality serves to underscore the verisimilitude of the events narrated: Leiziaga—and the readers—ought to witness la Conquista, with all its violence and brutality, through Lampugnano. More generally, the numerous allusions and borrowings from works by Pedro de Aguado, Las Casas, Castellanos, Benzoni, Gilii, De Pons, Humboldt, and Arístides Rojas serve to incorporate into the hybrid discourse at work in the novel not just accounts of historical events but also a concrete national and historical archive. Yet on the other hand, this historiographical parade coexists with, and is even channeled through, the paranormal, the hallucinatory, exoticism, and cliché. As it happens, in the end nobody believes Leiziaga’s story, and the conspicuous artificiality of various moments of the novel (for example, the representations of

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the Indians or Nila Cálice) belies any mimetic or anthropological intentionality. Historical factuality, the letrado archive, cliché, the exotic, the paranormal, artifice, fakery—they all coexist in/as Cubagua’s hauntography. One can read this incongruity as a sign of the conflict that lies at the heart of Núñez’s critique of national history. On the one hand, regardless of how aware he is of historical amnesia, ignorance, and its dangers, he is unable— and consciously so—to (re)write a wholly genuine and truthful account of history; on the other hand, he must necessarily seek legitimation in the historical archive and remain within the boundaries of letrado institutionality. Núñez was, after all, a historian; his critique does not come from the outside, even if it takes the form of fiction. Nobody believed Leiziaga’s ghost story, yet Núñez’s ought to be believed. This brings me to the question of lo maravilloso. Cubagua offers a prime example of the type of critique Stephanie Merrim calls “decolonizing of wonder,” 59 a practice of “contestatory self-exoticizing” that “mimics the colonizer’s discourse” but carries a countercolonial intention 60 (one can even say that the character of Nila Cálice performs this strategy). Historically, as Merrim points out, when the “South” has sought to position itself before the colonial-imperialist “North,” common responses have been to conceive the “South” as the site of the marvelous—as found in Carpentier or García Márquez, for example—or as the repository of superior spiritual values, as found in thinkers like Martí or Rodó. Cubagua combines both: there’s ghosts, hallucinations, and mythical beings; and the melancholy, the spirit, and the secrets of the Indians and Fray Dionisio are opposed to the immoral, rapacious, and foreign (neo)colonizer. However, it is necessary to draw attention to the specificity of the marvelous in this work. Cubagua has been associated in various ways to categories like the historical novel, magical realism, and even the “Boom” novel. The problem is that, barring a few exceptions, such connections are based on superficial and anachronistic analogies that overlook the distinctive nature of Núñez’s intervention. Cubagua is a fable about the ills of (neo)colonialism which, as I have shown here, can be read as a tale of haunting. What mediates between the “here” and the “beyond” is a hybrid discourse in which the marvelous is only part of a much broader, heterogeneous, and not necessarily hierarchical mixture that incorporates a specific national(ist) and institutionalized historicocultural archive. Cubagua is not merely a marvelous or modernist text, for the incorporation of such archive and its specificity are essential for Núñez’s project. This archive is partly constituted by works written by European chroniclers, missionaries, and explorers that register the history and culture of Venezuela from the discovery until Independence. Núñez’s further incorporates the work of Arístides Rojas—“the antiquarian of the New World” as Núñez called him—and this is quite significant insofar as Rojas was one of the preeminent architects of a national archive proper in the nineteenth century.

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The scope of Rojas’s work was encyclopedic, encompassing geography, botany, zoology, mythography, folklore, and history. He registered, studied, and assimilated those crónicas, documents, and travel narratives written by Europeans in order to craft a historiography that aims expressly to forge a discourse of national identity. This discourse carries a counter-colonial component and, significantly, the ghost is one of the devices used to convey it. In his essay on Nueva Cádiz and the pearl fisheries in Cubagua, Rojas imagines the voices of the dead, some retelling their sufferings, others confessing their crimes. 61 Cubagua is directly inspired by this vision. Cubagua’s hauntography is in part nationalist and letrada, and the marvelous in the novel is inseparable from this archive. Núñez takes a step forward by assimilating the archive in order to forge a countercolonial fable about modern Venezuela’s misreading, distortion, forgetting, or indifference toward its own history. Cubagua was written under unique historical and geopolitical circumstances: the birth of the Venezuelan petrostate—arguably the only petrostate in the West. The distinctive changes—windfall revenue and accelerated modernization—that oil brought became one of Enrique Bernardo Núñez’s lasting preoccupations. In 1939 he wrote that every stage in the history of Venezuela “tiene su forma, su monstruo, desde la argolla y el caballo del conquistador hasta el más poderoso de todos: el oleoducto” 62 [has its own form, its monster, from the ring and the horse of the conquistador, to the most powerful of all: the oil pipe]. The island of Cubagua was not only the site of the first city in Venezuela and one the very first places in the Americas devastated by the obsessive greed of the first conquistadors—it was also the first place in Venezuela where azeyte petrolio was found and exported abroad. Oil is one of Venezuela’s ghosts and it is still haunting us today. NOTES * I would like to thank Andrea Bachner and Cecilia Enjuto-Rangel for their comments on mediation and the avant-garde after listening to a preliminary version of this chapter. 1. Arístides Rojas, “La primera colonia en aguas de Venezuela, 1498–1550” [The First Colonial Settlement on Venezuelan Waters, 1498–1550], in Orígenes venezolanos (Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2008). 2. Enrique Bernardo Núñez, “Juicios sobre la historia de Venezuela,” in Novelas y ensayos (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987), 208 (hereafter cited Novelas). 3. I use the edition included in Novelas, 3–66, and the critical edition Cubagua, ed. Alejandro Bruzual (Caracas: Fundación Celarg, 2014) (hereafter cited Cubagua). Quotations from the novel will be indicated by the abbreviations Novelas and Cubagua, followed by the respective page numbers. 4. See Douglas Bohórquez Rincón, Escritura, memoria y utopía en Enrique Bernardo Nuñez (Caracas: Ediciones La Casa de Bello, 1990); Gustavo Luis Carrera, “Cubagua’ y la fundación de la novela venezolana estéticamente contemporánea,” Revista Iberoamericana 60, nos. 166–67 (January–June 1994): 451–56; Lloyd King, “La significación y la visión estética moral en Cubagua de Enrique Bernardo Núñez,” Mundo Nuevo 16, no. 4 (1993): 481–87; Osvaldo Larrazábal Henríquez, Enrique Bernardo Núñez (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1969); Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Historia y ficción en la novela venezolana

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(Caracas: Monte Avila Editores, 1990); and Juan Carlos Orrego Arismendi, “Alejo Carpentier ante lo indígena: ¿Antropólogo, escritor o nativo?,” Revista de Estudios Sociales 37 (September–December 2010): 163–74. 5. The most thorough comparative analysis of Cubagua, Doña Bárbara, and The Red Lances is found in Alejandro Bruzual, “Naturaleza, historia y neocolonialismo en Cubagua, de Enrique Bernardo Núñez,” Revista Iberoamericana 76, nos. 232–33 (July–December 2010): 807–19. See also Bohórquez Rincón, Escritura; Gustavo Luis Carrera, “‘Cubagua’ y la fundación de la novela venezolana estéticamente contemporánea”; Larrazábal Henríquez, Enrique Bernardo Núñez; and Márquez Rodríguez, Historia y ficción en la novela venezolana. 6. Bruzual, “Naturaleza, historia y neocolonialismo en Cubagua, de Enrique Bernardo Núñez,” 808. 7. Enrique Otte, “Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua,” in Cedulario de la monarquía española relativo a la isla de Cubagua, 1523–1550, ed. Enrique Otte (Caracas: Academia de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales, 1984), vol. 1, ix–liv. 8. María del Pilar Blanco, Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 9. 9. The motif of the ghost also appears in Núñez’s La galera de Tiberio [Tiberius’s Galley] (Novelas, 67–142), a novel about the lives of a group of Venezuelan exiles in Panama during Gómez’s dictatorship. It is named after one of the “ghost ships” (Novelas, 76) that appear near the Panama Canal. 10. This is the ending established in the critical edition Cubagua, but the reference to the final trip to the Orinoco is omitted in the ending of the Novelas edition; here it is suggested that Leiziaga returns to Cubagua. 11. Novelas, 19–20; Cubagua, 40–41. 12. The Spaniards found “azeyte petrólio” in Cubagua and Margarita. It was used for medicinal purposes and exported to Spain. See Novelas, 19; Cubagua, 40; and Cedulario, ed. Otte, vol. 2, 54. 13. Novelas, 20; Cubagua, 42. 14. Novelas, 23; Cubagua, 48. 15. Novelas, 23; Cubagua, 48. 16. Luis Duno-Gottberg, “Narrating From the Ruins: Cubagua and La galera de Tiberio by Enrique Bernardo Núñez,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 6, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 77–85. 17. See Duno-Gottberg, “Narrating From the Ruins” for an analysis of the motifs of ruins, archaeology and collecting in Cubagua. 18. Novelas, 25; Cubagua, 53. 19. In 1528 Charles V gave Lampugnano the license to use the machine in exchange for one-third of the profits. The license was eventually revoked after vigorous protests from Cubagua’s residents. See Cedulario, ed. Otte, vol. 1, 50–51, vol. 1, 63–66; and vol. 1, 97–98; and Girolamo Benzoni, History of the New World, trans. W. H. Smyth (1857; repr., New York: B. Franklin, 1970), 51–52. 20. Novelas, 25; Cubagua, 53. 21. Novelas, 25; Cubagua, 53. 22. Novelas, 26; Cubagua, 57. 23. Núñez takes some liberties with the dates here. The Indian rebellion occurred in 1520, but Lampugnano and his machine didn’t arrive in Cubagua until 1528. 24. Novelas, 28; Cubagua, 61. 25. Later on (Novelas, 44; Cubagua, 100) it is revealed that Fray Dionisio has kept his own mummified head in his quarters and that he had been killed by an Indian centuries ago. 26. Rojas, Orígenes venezolanos, 291–314. The chapter on Vocchi in Cubagua is also based on a chronicle by Rojas. See also Núñez’s study “Arístides Rojas: Anticuario del nuevo mundo” (Novelas, 256–92). 27. Novelas, 33–34; Cubagua, 73–76. Humboldt registers the word “zenquerot” as the name of the moon in the account of his travel in the upper Orinoco. See Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (Paris: N. Maze, 1819), vol. 2, 368. https://books.google.com/books?id=rxpYAAAAcAAJ (accessed July 25, 2015).

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28. Novelas, 34–35; Cubagua, 76. 29. Novelas, 38; Cubagua, 83. 30. Novelas, 38; Cubagua, 83–84. 31. Novelas, 7; Cubagua, 13. 32. Novelas, 8; Cubagua, 14. 33. Novelas, 41; Cubagua, 94. 34. Novelas, 42; Cubagua, 96. 35. Novelas, 16; Cubagua, 31. 36. Novelas, 42; Cubagua, 96. 37. See Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América (Mexico, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986); and Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 38. See “La leyenda del moriche” [The Legend of the Moriche Palm] in Rojas, Orígenes venezolanos, 3–8. Amalivac arrived when the world was completely flooded and only one man and one woman survived by staying on top of a mountain. Amalivac drew the figures of the sun and the moon on a rock, and humankind was born again after the man and the woman began to throw seeds of a moriche palm tree. 39. Novelas, 47; Cubagua, 112. 40. See Novelas, 28; Cubagua, 61. 41. Novelas, 44; Cubagua, 100–1. 42. Novelas, 49; Cubagua, 119. 43. Novelas, 49; Cubagua, 119. 44. Novelas, 49; Cubagua, 119. 45. Novelas, 34; Cubagua, 76. 46. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–28. 47. Novelas, 56; Cubagua, 140. 48. Novelas, 56–57; Cubagua, 140–41. 49. Novelas, 58; Cubagua, 148. 50. Novelas, 59; Cubagua, 148–49. 51. In prison, the ghost of Lampugnano visits Leiziaga—“Lampugnano? Is it Lampugnano? And it was himself”—but a “painful anguish” oppresses Leiziaga and renders him unable to come to terms with everything he has experienced (Novelas, 62; Cubagua, 154). 52. Novelas, 61; emphasis in the original; Cubagua, 152. 53. Novelas, 62; Cubagua, 155. 54. Novelas, 209. 55. Novelas, 210. 56. Novelas, 210. 57. Novelas, 38; Cubagua, 83. 58. From a different perspective, Bruzual argues that in Cubagua “nature” itself “is a type of history” (“Naturaleza, historia y neocolonialismo en Cubagua, de Enrique Bernardo Núñez,” 814) insofar as nature is the site of the riches that have been exploited, and historical events necessarily depart from or return to this relationship with nature. 59. Stephanie Merrim, “Wonders and Wounds of ‘Southern’ Histories,” in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies ed. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, 311–32 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 318. 60. Merrim, “Wonders and Wounds of ‘Southern’ Histories,” 319. 61. Rojas, Orígenes venezolanos, 295–56. 62. Enrique Bernardo Núñez, Bajo el samán (Caracas: Tipografía Vargas, 1963), 25.

Chapter Eleven

Portraits of the Walking Dead Transgressing Genres and (In)visible Demographics in Maurice Echeverría María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

The spectral, within the context of the literary and the cinematic in Latin America, has often paradoxically made of its presence a representation of absence. Ghosts and ghostly beings have traditionally represented fragmented memories of a community suffering a collective post-traumatic stress, whether it be that of colonialism, or more recently, the civil strife and authoritarian regimes that have plagued nations across the continent. 1 The ghost, according to Avery F. Gordon, is “one form by which something lost, or barely visible . . . makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course.” 2 She continues, revealing that the ghostly functions through a practice of haunting “a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively . . . into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative experience.” 3 While it may be true that the presence of an afterlife has often been connected to the writing of magical realism in Latin America, it is perhaps equally true to affirm that the spectral has not been a generalized or popular narrative strategy in the prose produced in Central America. The few manifestations we can discern have generally been written as effects/affects of the region’s strong indigenous heritage. Such is the case in Miguel Ángel Asturias’s Hombres de maíz [Men of Corn] (1949), where the phantasmal or spectral is presented through the reincarnation of Nico as a coyote. The animal represents an indigenous guardian spirit and a manifestation of a Mayan heritage that overshadows, and in some way haunts, a present that falls victim to the devastation of uncontrolled capitalism and 187

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foreign direct investment. 4 Another example of this narrative strategy can be found in Gioconda Belli’s La mujer habitada [The Inhabited Woman] (1988), where the spectral gains life, so to speak, through the creation of a metaphysical and spiritual indigenous identity that establishes a connection between politico-racial conflicts of the colonial past with revolutionary struggles by the militant Left in contemporary Nicaragua. 5 Writing from a similar context, Sergio Ramírez, however, employs the spectral to engage a tangential inquiry into the literary production of postwar Central America. In Margarita, está linda la mar [Margarita, the Sea Looks Beautiful] (1998), 6 the scribe-politician makes use of the ghost of the modernista par excellence, Rubén Darío, to haunt the writing of his new historical novel, insinuating that the phantasm of the Central American innovator should and must linger over the contemporary literary production from the region, and to thereby retake the reigns of aesthetic innovation that has been long-forgotten after years of literatura comprometida and testimonio. The writing by Ramírez of an aesthetics and poetics of the spectral can be read as a fortuitous intervention, since the surrounding and subsequent years have witnessed a boom of narrative prose produced in the region, of novels marked by a certain cynicism that self-consciously deviate from a cogent politics that characterized the fiction produced in the region in previous decades. These novels, instead, posit a studied point of entry into the violent and degenerative political/ economic/social realities that are left as a result of civil and economic wars that have recently attacked the social body. In the following pages, I propose to textually explore the domestication of the effects and systems of the economic war, focusing on how fiction can domesticate the practices and effects of neoliberal policies within a space composed of the body, both subjective and social, of phantasmagoric creatures. To do so, I follow the framework constructed by Vinodh Venkatesh, who, in combining a reading of Michel de Certeau’s notion of practice with the socioeconomic studies of Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská, and Dariusz Świątek regarding the domestication of macroeconomic processes on the local scale, argues that “subnational actors and places can . . . successfully domesticate, or scale-down, macro-processes to a tangible system of representation, and . . . permit an understanding of the broader connections between literature and society.” 7 This framework allows, in turn, a reading that illustrates how neoliberalism, as a practice constructed by and through a variety of practices and systems, does not only pertain to the worlds of politicians, bureaucrats, economists, and businessmen, but also as a process that can and has been domesticated by the practices of subnational diegetic actors. 8 In the case of recent Central American fiction, these subnational actors are often written as not being alive, as phantasms or entities between worlds, ontologically cultivated from and working around an epistemology of death within the realm of the living. Working, therefore, in conso-

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nance with Venkatesh’s proposal, I argue that in Central America, macro social/political/economic processes of neoliberalism ontologically and epistemologically permeate the narrative universe through the recurring and persistent presence of spectral bodies. 9 Following this line of inquiry, the following pages examine the spectral in connection with a present sociopolitico-economic climate that has metaphorically textualized the Global South as a space of death and dying, going beyond traditional readings that locate the spectral as a narrative strategy that demands the closure of mysteries and enigmas of an unresolved past. The phantasmagoric, therefore, is not reduced to mere fantastic visions or figments of the imagination, but as a presence more in tune with the corporal and its more scatological characteristics. The spectral in this recent narrative materializes in a tangible, albeit ambiguous, space, where the dead organism exists simultaneously with the breathing body, or what Colin McGinn calls “a kind of death-in-life.” 10 The articulation here of the spectral, therefore, distances itself from the traditional writing of the ghostly entity as something liminal and difficult to perceive. This articulation, in turn, provides a new point of entry into the study of contemporary Central American narrative, thereby simultaneously entering in dialogue with the narrative genealogies proposed by Misha Kokotovic and Beatriz Cortez. Working with a diverse set of novels, Kokotovic coins the term “neoliberal noir” to describe a corpus that shares “a noir sensibility characterized by a pervasive sense of corruption, decay, and disillusionment, in which the social order itself, and particularly the state, is the ultimate source of criminality, rather than of justice.” 11 Cortez, in turn, speaks of the generic brand of aesthetics of cynicism to describe an “estética marcada por la pérdida de la fe en los valores morales y en los proyectos sociales de carácter utópico” 12 [an aesthetics characterized by the loss of faith in moral values and utopic social projects]. According to Cortez, this cynical spirit originates in a postwar climate that portrays “a las sociedades centroamericanas en estado de caos, corrupción y violencia” 13 [Central American societies in a state of chaos, corruption, and violence]. That said, and just as not all texts that adhere to an aesthetics of cynicism can be generically included under the categorization of neoliberal noir, the textual presence of the spectral is not necessarily conditioned by either genre or aesthetic. The majority of these spectral, or more specifically living-dead Central American novels, do not strictly follow the genealogy proposed by Kokotovic, though they evidence points in contact vis-à-vis the state of corruption and decay of their diegetic societies, nor do they completely subscribe to Cortez’s aesthetic position, though they too make contact with an exploration of “los deseos más oscuros del individuo . . . y su interacción con un mundo de violencia y caos” 14 [the most obscure desires of the individual . . . and his interaction with a world of violence and chaos].

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As a bridging entity between the living and the dead, the spectral materializes in Central America through subjective/social actors that can be referred to as the living dead, or perhaps more specifically, living bodies in a state of decomposition. 15 A clear example of this phenomenon can be found in Managua Salsa City: Devórame otra vez [Managua Salsa City: Devour Me Again] (1999) by the Guatemalan Franz Galich, where Managua is described as a hellish space, stained and conditioned by the corruption extant in local institutions of power. It is a cityspace inhabited by “miles y miles de muertos [que] . . . invaden el mundo de los vivos” 16 [thousands and thousands of dead bodies . . . invading the world of the living]. The living dead as putrefying bodies are, according to McGinn, a stimulatory agent of the visceral emotion of disgust. 17 Disgust, in turn, and following Aurel Kolnai’s theorizations, refers to all that is “pregnant with death,” 18 which in this case are the inhabitants of the Nicaraguan capital, since “[d]isgust records the transition states where the integrity of an organism begins to fall apart, as when a putrefying corpse manifests the change from that which was living and human to a mass of undifferentiated, stinking ooze.” A further example within this same trajectory can be found in Cantos de las guerras preventivas [Songs of the Preventive Wars] (2006) by the Costa Rican Fernando Contreras Castro, who in an attempt to critique the social realities of neoliberalism, describes how “la gente moría de diarreas y vómitos” 19 [people were dying from diarrhea and sickness] in a city where “por todas partes había moribundos, cuerpos llagados pidiendo el tiro de gracia que nadie podía darles” 20 [there were dying people everywhere, wounded bodies asking for the coup de grace that nobody could execute]. The spectrality of the living-dead, however, is not always connected to individuals, but on occasion is also used on a larger scale to write the practices and effects of neoliberalism onto the national/transnational body of Central American society. Evidence of this can be found in Sopa de caracol [Snail Soup] (2002) by Arturo Arias, whose native land—”Guatepeor” 21 —is nothing more than a “pústul[a] patria” 22 [wounded homeland], a body suffering from a debilitating infection that infects the living. We can see in these examples that in opposition to the prosperity often promised by neoliberal policies, what is really being written in its fictive representations is a social disease that extricates all characteristics of life from its citizens, turning them into a sort of walking dead. These half-living/half-dead occupy the narrative space generated by the Guatemalan writer, Maurice Echeverría, in Diccionario esotérico [The Esoteric Dictionary] (2006). 23 The novel recounts the life of Daniel, an upper-middle-class youth, who, as the plot advances, transforms into a vain and perturbed character whose only aspiration in life is to satisfy his every desire without contemplating the effects of his own actions. As a sort of demiurge, Daniel converts Guatemala City into a “Playground”—or more accurately, his playground—a leisure

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space where he can act out his will with impunity. Daniel is, like the gamer who controls an in-game avatar in the world of role-playing games (RPGs), a subject who acts out the most inhumane and ethically problematic actions against his fellow living beings as a result of enjoying a limitless acquisition of personal power, akin to the same gamer who sees his proverbial score increase with each virtual action. It is in this regard that Daniel domesticates the practices of the neoliberal ideology, which bases itself in a rejection of social safety nets and the welfare state in favor of the ambitious political/ economic promotion of the sovereign individual. Further characteristics of this assertion can be found in the protagonist’s obsession with black magic and the connected desire to gain control of the human, animal, and natural bodies in his immediate surroundings. His extreme narcissism, as expressed through the drive of mastering the dark arts, can be superimposed over the neoliberal axiom of viewing life as a resource that can be controlled and capitalized. This drive reinforces the notion that the neoliberal episteme has “pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way [Daniel] interpret[s], live[s] in and understand[s] the world.” 24 The protagonist, therefore, serves as a textual articulation of a politicoeconomic discourse that legitimizes and normalizes a set and praxis of behaviors that can be read as morally vile and sociopathic. These actions, once recalibrated under the notion of domestication, that is, that subnational (and textual) actors can and do perform macroeconomic practices, are clear examples of an economic ideology based on the consumption of goods and desires, which once satisfied, “producen nuevos deseos que, en forma de antojos, se justifican ideológicamente como necesidades” 25 [produce new desires that, as whims, are ideologically justified as needs]. The normalization of these practices rewrites domestic spaces and engenders very negative consequences especially for the socially marginalized. The first of these rewritings in Diccionario esotérico occurs when the protagonists appropriates the real space, that is, the extra-textual Latin American referent, of Guatemala City as the Anglicized “Playground.” This linguistic usurpation points the reader in the direction of Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez’s conception of a McOndo space (and not only a literary movement), where McDonald’s coexists with Macondo, as globalized latecapitalism is fused with and really takes over a decidedly Latin American tradition and space. What is interesting about globalization in this gesture is not “la expansión comercial a escala mundial, ni la revolución informática . . . ni [siquiera] la emergencia de una cultura global y cosmopolita,” [the commercial expansion on a world scale, nor the computing revolution . . . nor the emergence of a global and cosmopolitan culture], but instead, “la subsunción de las distintas esferas de la vida social, el tiempo y el espacio a la lógica expansiva y acumulativa del capital” 26 [the insertion of the different spheres of social life, as well as time and space, into the expansive and

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cumulative logic of the capitalist system]. The production of wealth coincides, in this regard, with the “producción de jouissance” 27 [production of jouissance], in that the physical exploitation by, and the satisfaction of sexual desire of, the protagonist, within his unlimited quest for power, can be textually read as a domestication of the foundational philosophies of neoliberalism. His desire “es subsumido a la lógica acumulativa del capital” 28 [is inserted into the accumulative logic of capital] and is regulated by the rate of pleasure, which “sólo puede mantenerse en alto mediante una más extensa e intensiva explotación del deseo en la forma de plusplacer, excedente del placer necesaria y permanentemente insatisfecho, que empuja . . . a la constitución de nuevos objetos de deseo, activando [así] el consumo y con él la economía” 29 [can only be upheld through a more prolonged and intense exploitation of desire as plus pleasure, a necessary surplus of pleasure that is permanently unfulfilled and pushes . . . (the consumer) to find new objects of desire, thus activating the process of consumption and, consequently, the economy]. This logic of the workings of the impulsive affect of desire seems to validate Daniel’s scabrous behavior, who in all instances manages to justify actions that allow for a satiation, albeit ephemeral of his desire. He believes that he has the authority to appropriate, and even to penetrate the othered bodies in the text—bodies that are already victims of multiple forms of violence and which are currently in a state of literal and metaphorical decomposition—to satisfy his carnal and psychic needs. The relationship that Daniel maintains with the creatures that occupy the “Playground,” spectral bodies that are both living and dead, allows for a politicoeconomic reading of the relationship between the global North and the countries of Central America, which, like the spectral bodies that fall victim to Daniel’s actions, have been mistreated and oppressed over the course of their history. It is in the “Playground” that Daniel transmogrifies the spatial reality into a hyperreal space inhabited by phantasmagoric bodies that are then inscribed with the abusive practices of uninhibited consumption. The first of these bodies is Daniel himself, who affirms that “el proceso de vampirización ya se había desencadenado en [él]” 30 [his vampirization process had already started]. The protagonist, therefore, occupies a remapped space of life-death, as an “experto chupasangre [quien] chupa la sangre de su prójimo para poder en consecuencia seguir vivo” 31 [expert bloodsucker (who) sucks the blood of his peers in order to remain alive]. The narrativization of the metaphoric extraction and consumption of blood is commented upon by Carmen, the protagonist’s romantic partner, as “deformaciones o monstruosidades, soberbios intentos del hombre por manipular la naturaleza y el orden divino” 32 [deformations or monstruosities, (Daniel’s) arrogant attempts to manipulate nature and divine order]. The function of the vampire-figure’s emblematic fangs which penetrate the dermis of the victim to thereby impregnate them

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with a new (after)life, is in the case of the protagonist, performed by his “verga” 33 [cock], “sexo hinchado a reventar” 34 [swollen penis about to explode] that spears innumerable bodies as the novel progresses. The traditional phallic power of the fangs is inscribed onto the corporal locus of Daniel’s masculinity, where power and psychic authority are combined. Just as the vampire’s fangs remain hidden until their fatal use, the protagonist’s penis remains clothed and protected until he decides to engage in often violent and forceful sex. In a similar vein, the fangs and the protagonist’s penis engender new life forms, which paradoxically are lacking in life as the vampire feeds off their vital essence, creating in its wake a different body, better characterized as being living-dead. As a result, and following the modus operandi of the archetypal vampire, Daniel’s penetrated victims fall prey to his desire and will, becoming themselves lifeless bodies that are enslaved to the master who gains authority through the metaphorical extraction of their life-force. The desire to generate a new lifeform is pursued through several examples in the novel. The case of the pegamenteros, or glue-sniffing children, who aimlessly ambulate through the unforgiving streets of the “Playground” like zombies, merits special attention. Their addiction to the toxin manages to both provoke hallucinations and consume their inner organs, converting them into physical and psychological shells. These children, “no comen, no tienen hambre . . . su delgadez es cadavérica . . . son invisibles” 35 [do not eat, are not hungry . . . their skinniness is deathly . . . they are invisible]. The pegamenteros are to the protagonist nothing more than “pequeños colaboradores de la miseria” 36 [small contributors to misery], consequence of the poverty and marginalization that result from neoliberal politics, that “han llenado el vientre de la ballena, y le rascan las cavidades intestinales con sus pequeñas uñas sucias” [have filled up the whale’s stomach and are scratching its intestines with their small and dirty nails]. They produce in the protagonist “mucho asco [al] revolv[er] el aire con su menuda y terca respiración . . . [porque] [c]ada niño . . . es un poco menos de aire en esta ciudad contaminada . . . ellos consumen el mismo aire que yo consumo” 37 [much disgust as they churn the air with their trivial and stubborn breathing . . . (because) each child . . . means a little less air in this polluted city . . . they consume the same air that I do]. The drive to consume is, therefore, seemingly elevated to an apical position, whereas a natural resource such as the air people breathe is relegated to nothing more than an economic commodity that gains value in its ability to satisfy the individual’s desire. Daniel appropriates a vital resource, thereby implicitly suggesting that private consumption can and must trump the public enjoyment of said good. The protagonist’s reaction to sharing the air with the street children can also be viewed through the optic of the spectral, as his actions translate into a desire to expropriate the substance that fuels the life in the bodies that surround him. As a textual site that domesticates the practices

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of neoliberalism, Daniel’s vampiric body serves as the written signifier that inscribes the macroprocesses of privatizing public and natural resources. Such is the case that even the pegamenteros, as socially debilitated and marginalized actors, manage to attract the ambitious interests of the protagonist. Motivated by his thirst for power, the protagonist decides to “dar un sentido” [give a purpose] to the (dead) lives of the street urchins, fashioning them into “una fuerza activa militar” 38 [an active military force], under him as “Comandante General . . . cuya aspiración es perpetuarse indefinidamente en el poder” 39 [Major General . . . whose hope is to perpetuate his power indefinitely]. His status as a “mago” [wizard] allows him to reanimate the lifeless bodies of the children, essentially turning them into zombies. As one would expect, these now-living zombie bodies are obliged to serve the entity that gives them life. The zombie, as Jean and John Comaroff argue, “embodies a dispirited phantasm widely associated with the production, the possibility and impossibility, of these new forms of wealth,” 40 and appears during periods of “social disruption . . . characterized by sharp shifts in control over the fabrication and circulation of value.” 41 Within the diegesis, the pegamenteros are effectively the result of the lacking or disheveled social safety net that is produced by both civil strife and the practices of neoliberalism. Intradiegetically, however, the huelepega’s [glue sniffer’s] body underlines the thesis that the living-dead body represents through its practice and organic composition the slow process of violence, of which the social body of Central America falls to as a result of the always unsatisfied drive toward accumulation and consumption that defines the late-capitalist episteme. The pegamenteros become, therefore, a new identity position that the protagonist generalizes at the start of the novel as the “desperdiciados” 42 [wasted ones]. This identity position within a broader matrix of subjective and social politics can be explained as a byproduct of globalization, which instead of symbolically and visually integrating the global population, only really succeeds in emphasizing differences, thereby excluding a large portion of the social order that does and cannot conform to practices of consumption. In his attempts to reanimate the bodies of the pegamenteros, Daniel acts out his most depraved sexual undertaking by repeatedly raping Osiris, one of the street children obligated to satisfy his sexual desires, as the protagonist emphasizes that his needs are “estrictas, y aquel que no las cumpla será castigado con azotes” 43 [strict, and whoever does not obey them will be lashed]. He soon, however, contradicts himself, when he comments: “He dado un sentido a sus vidas. Yo por mi parte los respeto y los trato con justicia. Osiris me ofrece con sumisión febril su cuerpecito compacto por las noches que disfruto minuciosamente” 44 [I have given a meaning to their lives. I respect them and treat them fairly. Osiris offers her little and compact body to me in a febrile and submissive way at night and I minutely enjoy it].

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The rape of this particular character is not the only instance of pedophilia in the novel, as Daniel recounts how “[v]inieron a su mente esos cuerpos deliciosos de niñas (también niños) que h[a] violado a lo largo de toda [su] existencia” 45 [those delicious child bodies he has raped during his existence came to his mind]. The protagonist’s sexual ignominy in Diccionario esotérico follows the theorization that “zombie-makers are sexual perverts whose deformed genitalia and poisonous secretions make them unable to reproduce; they fuse, in a single grotesque, the every essence of negative value: the simultaneous, reciprocal destruction of both production and reproduction.” 46 We evidence, furthermore, that though Daniel is described as being sexually virile, his penis is described as being grotesque and deformed as it has “una protuberancia . . . [un] cáncer en [su] aparato genital, un bulto conciso y riguroso” 47 [a protuberance . . . (a) cancer in (his) genitals, a small and rigorous lump]. Following the previous theorization of the zombie-maker, it comes as no surprise that Daniel’s penis also secretes a poisonous fluid that ultimately works against his best interests. We can see this characteristic develop in the chapter dedicated to the giant Oruga or larva, a supernatural and living-dead creature that is simultaneously connected to Carmen and the protagonist. To understand the inclusion of this entity, it is convenient to review the relationship between Daniel and Carmen. As one would expect from his sexually promiscuous and nonheteronormative nature, Daniel repeatedly cheats on Carmen, who once presented with the facts, decides to end their relationship. Instead of accepting his responsibility for the break-up, Daniel engenders a deep hatred of Carmen, leading to a deranged paranoia that includes delusions of Carmen being a seventeenth-century witch “que el Demonio ha colocado cerca de [él] para jugar con su equilibrio espiritual” 48 [that the Devil placed next (to him) to play with his spiritual balance]. By identifying her as a witch, Daniel manages to justify Carmen’s death by burning. That being said, however, this barbarous revenge triggers in him a paradoxical desire: to bring her lifeless and burnt corpse back to life through magic. The destruction of life and the subsequent attempts to revive it/her are the driving forces that underline the practices of the always-unsatisfied protagonist who incessantly strives toward “la constitución de nuevos objetos de deseo, activando el consumo y con él la economía” 49 [the creation of new objects of desire, thus activating consumption and the economy]. By means of the protagonist, that is, the textual subject that domesticates the practices of neoliberalism, one can observe how consumption as a practice is exemplified in the novel through the sexual possession and penetration of othered bodies. The practice, furthermore, “opera a través de la captura de la fuerza del deseo” 50 [operates through the capture of the force of desire], which is circumscribed by the need to fulfill “la carencia del objeto deseado produciendo un objeto sucedáneo de naturaleza alucinatoria o fantasmática” 51 [the

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lack of the desired object producing, consequently, a hallucinatory replacement object]. Carmen’s absence as a result of the protagonist’s desire to destroy provokes, in turn, the phantasmagoric apparition of the larva as it falls from the ceiling of a room. The supernatural body is described as being an “[a]nimal . . . gigante . . . [de] piel . . . muy acuosa [que] secretaba constantemente un líquido transparente . . . negriamarillo . . . por todos sus lados . . . [y] se extendía y se recogía . . . y su piel [era] viscosa . . . [cubierta de] pústulas . . . [y] secreciones” 52 [giant . . . animal . . . with watery . . . skin that constantly secreted a transparent . . . black and yellow liquid all over . . . (and) it expanded and contracted . . . and its skin (was) viscous . . . (covered with) pustules (and) secretions]. The Oruga is an imaginary object that replicates the protagonist’s real desire through the production of a spectral entity. It is characteristically phantasmagoric on two levels. On the one hand, it incarnates the dead Carmen, as the protagonist evidences: “[l]a Oruga es el producto de mi operación hermética. Yo quería traer a Carmen de vuelta al mundo . . . en lugar de traer a Carmen, he traído . . . este universo de extrañeza” 53 [the Worm is the result of my secret operation. I wanted to bring Carmen back to the world . . . but, instead, I brought . . . this universe of oddness]. On the other hand, the larva is spectral in that the living cohabits with the dead; it is a body in a state of decomposition that emits a “líquido negriamarillo . . . [que] despid[e] un fuerte olor” 54 [black and yellow liquid (that) releases a strong smell] and produces a sensation of disgust in Daniel. As he indicates, the larva is “la mugre de su poder” 55 [the grime of his power], and becomes the “equivalente [de Daniel] en el mundo animal” 56 [equivalent (of Daniel) in the animal world]. The larva’s dark secretions subsequently merge with Daniel’s reproductive organs as he repeatedly rubs the liquid against his genitals. This action evidences the birth of a new desire that the protagonist must satisfy, one that is highlighted by his need to sexually possess Carmen to both placate his erection and return her to the realm of the living: “Si la Oruga es efectivamente Carmen, entonces mi deber es besar esa vagina extenuante . . . la Oruga se irá convirtiendo a lo largo de las semanas en Carmen . . . una Carmen preñada” 57 [If the Worm is, for all intents and purposes, Carmen, then my obligation is to desperately kiss that vagina . . . the Worm will become Carmen in the next few weeks . . . a pregnant Carmen]. The protagonist’s uncontrolled desire to possess does not derive its power from its own satisfaction, but, instead, through the insatiable act of desiring. Desire once satisfied loses its true nature, and since consumption/possession operate through the drive of desire, the production of the object of desire is seemingly constant and unlimited. The result of Daniel’s bestial actions is, obviously, surprising. Instead of returning Carmen to her human form, the act of penetrating the larva provokes in Daniel “fuertes espasmos y do-

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lores . . . por fornicar con algo que no es humano (al menos todavía)” 58 [strong spasms and pain . . . caused by his fornicating with something that was not (yet) human]. The narrative explains that the act of penetration seemingly allowed for “un agente o identidad de naturaleza paranormal” 59 [an agent or entity of paranormal nature] to enter the protagonist’s body in a sort of symbolic reverse fertilization. His “esperma brillante” 60 [sparkling sperm], aesthetically juxtaposed with the viscous dark secretions, furthermore, has the opposite effect, since instead of engendering new life, it succeeds in destroying the larval body. Penetration, therefore, proves the thesis that the “zombie-maker [is] unable to reproduce” 61 as a result of his genital deformity and the unviability of his semen. Given that the larval body is both the spectral articulation of Carmen’s body and the equivalent of the protagonist in the animal world, the praxis of penetration suggests that this is nothing more than a masturbatory act of self-fertilization, which can be read as an organic expression of the neoliberal episteme. Desire and its corresponding processes of penetration are inter/intra-corporal acts that highlight the primacy given to the sovereign subject in its apical position in relation to other social subjectivities. As his attempts of reproducing life in the body of the Oruga fail, the protagonist subsequently reinforces his commitment to the army of pegamenteros. He, furthermore, centers himself on a new desire: the creation of homuncula, or will-less artificial beings created and conditioned to kill and to follow the protagonist’s every order. The living-dead bodies, also called “Vorrks” in the novel, are “criaturas paranormales” 62 [paranormal creatures] that are birthed from Daniel’s “esperma incompleto [. . . que] h[a] tenido que liberar en sesiones masturbatorias continuas y francamente agotadoras” 63 [incomplete sperm . . . liberated through continuous and tiring masturbatory sessions]. Even though Daniel affirms his pride in the creation of the homuncula by explaining that “[e]l esperma utilizado para crear los Vorrks es el [suyo], por supuesto” 64 [the sperm used to create the Vorrks was his own, of course], the narrative quickly deemphasizes and almost mocks his false position of power by highlighting that it took four attempts to successfully create the living-dead bodies. It is, furthermore, necessary to highlight their foul nature, as their own state of decomposition reveals how they infect and destroy all other bodies in their wake through the production of a contagious fungus. This fungus, a further example of the novel’s detailing and focus on the natural and the organic as sites and symbols of the liminality between life and death, highlights the notion that they too are vampiric bodies in their ability to generate death. Leading in this path away from life, the protagonist falls victim to his own anxiety for power. His narcissistic appetite turns against him, forcing the acknowledgement that “no será inmortal por el resto de [sus] días . . . que ha fracasado” 65 [he will not be immortal for the rest of his life . . . he had failed]. The textual bodies that inhabit his Playground, that

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is, the life-death forms he has slowly engendered, rebel against his authority, “mordiéndo[le]” 66 [by biting him]. Bloodied and disheveled, Daniel meets his end in a fiery finale that consumes the organic traces of the body, leaving it unable to regenerate as a future life-death form. In sum, Echeverría’s Diccionario esotérico portrays and warns against the megalomaniacal neoliberal actor who garners power through the spatial transformation of the city into his own Playground. That being said, however, the character meets his end through this very nature, thereby becoming an object of study in a contemporary Central American fiction that writes the domestication of neoliberalism and its practices through an aesthetics of the living-dead. This, in turn, emblemizes the often unspoken and unwritten collateral damage of economic systems that are solely invested in consumption and gain, leaving in their wake the textual zombies that cannot partake in the economic benefits of late capitalism. The writing of the phantasmal in Diccionario esotérico can be politically and aesthetically read as a means to both understand and critique the neoliberal episteme, as it engenders a narrative practice that goes beyond writing the living, that is, by means of the spaces of the dead or of liminal bodies such as the Oruga, and focuses, instead, on the destructive and uncontrollable processes and effects of an insatiable economic system. NOTES 1. The metaphorical line drawn here is quite simple, yet incredibly effective in a broad series of literature. 2. Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination s (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 8. 3. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8. 4. Miguel Ángel Asturias, Hombres de maíz (Guatemala: Editorial Piedra Santa, 1991). 5. Gioconda Belli, La mujer habitada (Managua: Editorial Vanguardia, 1988). 6. Sergio Ramírez, Margarita, está linda la mar (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1998). 7. Vinodh Venkatesh, “La hermana secreta de Angélica María: Enrique Serna Writes the Lost Decade,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 47, no. 1 (March 2013): 105. 8. A subnational actor is “a subunit of a territorial state that has a territorially defined limit, its own areas of jurisdiction, and its own political institutions” (Daniel W. Drezner, Locating the Proper Authorities: The Interaction of Domestic and International Institutions [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003], 72). In this definition a subnational actor can be an individual or a community, such as a household or workplace, whose “mundane practices of economic life enabl[e] a detailed understanding of how neoliberalism is understood, negotiated and contested” (Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovská, and Dariusz Świątek, Domesticating Neo-Liberalism: Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in PostSocialist Cities [Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010], 64). 9. See María del Carmen Caña Jiménez, “Vida resurgida y neoliberalismo en Tikal Futura de Franz Galich,” Latin American Literary Review 42, no. 84 (2014): 68–87. 10. Colin McGinn, The Meaning of Disgust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 16. 11. Misha Kokotovic, “Neoliberal Noir: Contemporary Central American Crime Fiction as Social Criticism,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 24, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 15. 12. Beatriz Cortez, “Estética del cinismo: La ficción centroamericana de posguerra,” Ancora: Suplemento Cultural de la Nación (2000): 2, Also available online, March 11, 2001, 1–15,

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at http://wvw.nacion.com/ancora/2001/marzo/11/historia3.html (accessed September 20, 2012). 13. Cortez, “Estética del cinismo,” 1. 14. Cortez, “Estética del cinismo.” 15. See Caña Jiménez, “El asco: reflexiones estéticas sobre la violencia neoliberal en Centroamérica,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 68, no. 4 (2014): 218–30. 16. Franz Galich, Managua Salsa City: Devórame otra vez (El Dorado: Géminis and Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá, 1999), 1. 17. McGinn, The Meaning of Disgust, 16. 18. Aurel Kolnai, On Disgust, ed. Barry Smith and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 18. 19. Fernando Contreras Castro, Cantos de las guerras preventivas (Bogotá: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006), 42. 20. Contreras Castro, Cantos de las guerras preventivas, 47. 21. Arturo Arias, Sopa de caracol (Ciudad de Guatemala: Alfaguara, 2002), 184. 22. Arias, Sopa de caracol, 213. 23. Maurice Echeverría, Diccionario esotérico (Ciudad de Guatemala: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2006) (hereafter cited Diccionario). 24. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 3. 25. Abril Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” in El lenguaje de las emociones, ed. Mabel Moraña e Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2012), 46. 26. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” 42. 27. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal.” 42. 28. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” 45. 29. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal.” 47. 30. Diccionario, 30. 31. Diccionario, 30. 32. Diccionario, 34. 33. Diccionario, 59. 34. Diccionario, 52. 35. Diccionario, 205. 36. Diccionario, 209. 37. Diccionario, 209. 38. Diccionario, 220. 39. Diccionario, 333. 40. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” CODSFERIA Bulletin 3–4 (1999): 18. 41. Comaroff and Comaroff examine the figure of the zombie vis-à-vis that of the immigrant in an era of “social and material transformations sparked by the rapid raise of neoliberal capitalism on a global scale” (“Alien-Nation,” 25) and within the context of rural post-apartheid South Africa. I go beyond Comaroff and Comaroff by expanding the idea of the zombie to that of any living dead creature/space and by connecting it to the broader arena of neoliberal practices. 42. Diccionario, 14. 43. Diccionario, 224. 44. Diccionario, 224. 45. Diccionario, 138. 46. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 21. 47. Diccionario, 154. 48. Diccionario, 77. 49. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” 45. 50. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” 43. 51. Trigo, “La función de los afectos en la economía político-libidinal,” 45. 52. Diccionario, 157–61.

200 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

María del Carmen Caña Jiménez Diccionario, 169. Diccionario, 167. Diccionario, 169. Diccionario, 161. Diccionario, 172–73. Diccionario, 173–74. Diccionario, 175. Diccionario, 175. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 21. Diccionario, 288. Diccionario, 291. Diccionario, 292. Diccionario, 341. Diccionario, 367.

Chapter Twelve

Haunting Capitalism Biutiful, the Specter, and Fantasies of the Global Market Victoria L. Garrett and Edward M. Chauca

Biutiful, a Mexican-Spanish coproduction directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and set in the contemporary working-class Barcelona suburb of Santa Coloma, is replete with different kinds of hauntings that merit different critical approaches. 1 Biutiful portrays the interstices of society that political consensuses neglect, representing cinematographically the spaces and agents of global capitalist exploitation. It exposes the specters that haunt the dominant power structure: undocumented workers, political exiles, the spiritual world, and the gray market. They are visible during most of the film, not just as ghosts, but as living characters with their own quotidian dramas. In the first two sections of this chapter, we examine these kinds of characters, whose precariousness haunts the viewer and the structures of power within the film to underscore the shortcomings of the political and economic status quo. In the third section, we move beyond this reading to analyze the spectral nature of the power structure itself—in the case of Biutiful, late global capitalism. We argue that global capitalism haunts the characters through insatiable fantasies and consumerist desires that manifest themselves through repetitive simulacra. However, because the simulacra fail to conceal the social precariousness created by the global market, these characters find and create new ways to socially reposition themselves within the national and global imaginary. Therefore, we dedicate the last sections to exploring the cultural agency of the characters and the role of the viewer within this social and cultural dynamic. We argue that the film creates a critical space in which viewers may recognize the spectral nature of capitalism’s fantasies within the film and in their own lives. 201

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SPECTRAL FATHERS Biutiful centers on the challenges of Uxbal, father of two, in the last months of his life. He has full custody of his daughter, Ana, and son, Mateo; their bipolar mother, Marambra, has only sporadic contact with them. His role as a father, which is threatened by his impending death from prostate cancer, introduces his pressing concern with being remembered by his children so they do not grow up, like him, without knowing their father. Uxbal’s father fled Francoist persecution when he was twenty years old, before Uxbal was born, and died of pneumonia three days after arriving in Mexico. The film opens and closes with a scene that establishes the importance of the father figure in the film. In his dark bedroom, a dying Uxbal and his daughter lie in bed whispering to each other while he gives her his grandmother’s diamond ring. While they are still talking, the film cuts to a scene, set in a snowy forest, which breaks with the rest of the film’s spatio-temporal setting. As the film’s opening, this foreshadowing scene establishes the strange nature of the relationship between two not-yet-identified adult men. The viewer watches the two, one younger than the other, bonding through a strange mix of childish joking and manly smoking together. The course of the film will reveal that the young man is the ghost of Uxbal’s father and that the space is the threshold of the afterlife. The strange age difference between Uxbal and his father introduces a disjunction in both the film’s narrative and the narrative of Spanish national history. The specter of the young father functions allegorically to signal a gap in the construction and organization of Spanish society, where the absence of an affective paternal figure in the familial realm was filled by the authoritarian paternal figure of dictator Francisco Franco in the public sphere. As Laura M. Kanost notes in her work on translations as haunted texts, “[A] ghost is not a passive metaphor; . . . [g]hosts exist because they are not at peace. They haunt in order to call attention to some injustice, misrepresentation, or lack of representation.” 2 The appearance of Uxbal’s father in the spiritual world draws attention to his lack of representation in the material world. For Jacques Derrida, the haunting specter appears in order to demand justice, a messianic justice that cannot be simply fulfilled by institutional or human justice. 3 Specters appear to show that a tragic event has ruptured the collective narratives that create the illusion that justice existed prior to said event. As Derrida says quoting Hamlet, the tragic event puts time “out of joint,” 4 which makes determining when time got “out of joint” a central concern in hauntology. In the case of Biutiful, the appearance of the young specter of Uxbal’s father exposes that time and space are “out of joint” because of Francoism: the father’s premature death is a direct consequence of Francoist persecution. 5 This connection, along with Uxbal’s insistence on remembering the

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father, signal the film’s explicit attempt to comment on the legacies of Spain’s incomplete process of historical memory as well as the urgency of completing it. Uxbal’s personal narrative reveals that Francoism has altered the national narrative of justice as well as individual narratives like his. As such, the specter not only has affective significance for Uxbal, but his father is also a specter of national history, conjuring that which has not been properly appropriated, symbolized, or mourned in the Post-Franco era: the victims of Francoism. As Jo Labanyi has shown, different contemporary Spanish writers and filmmakers have made use of ghosts to introduce the subject of the victims of Francoism in the present. Labanyi states that “in a country that has emerged from forty years of cultural repression, the task of making reparation to the ghosts of the past—that is, to those relegated to the status of living dead, denied voice and memory—is considerable.” 6 In line with her argument, the image of the father’s coffin when Uxbal views his father’s remains alludes to the coffins and mass graves of the victims of the Spanish Civil War, many of which remain untouched to this day. The relative lack of politics of memory, which has left so many disappeared without evidence, makes the case of Uxbal’s father—whose body has been recovered, identified, and returned to Spain to be buried—seem almost like a privilege. The fact that Uxbal’s father died in Mexico allows the existence of a record of his death and makes it possible to repatriate his remains under democracy. Nevertheless, it is clear that the memory of those persecuted under Francoism has not yet been officially installed in the public sphere: a failure attributable to the lack of politics of memory during the transition to democracy and subsequent governments. Only oral traditions, such as the stories of his father that Uxbal tells to his children, can combat oblivion. The event that put time “out of joint,” Francoism, is not solely responsible for consigning memory of its opponents to official oblivion. Even under democracy the memory of the victims continues being erased, as the film exemplifies through the mall that will be constructed over the cemetery where the remains of Uxbal’s father rest. If there are some remnants of the memory of Francoism’s victims, consumerism will complete the task of eliminating them. There is, consequently, no justice for those who were marginalized by the fascist project and the subsequent political transition. The only space left for the victims’ descendents within the film is the periphery of the global market. The absence of a protective father in the past, who in this case was replaced by the authoritarian patriarchal figure of Franco, has installed a precariousness that allows the characters to be abused in the global market. The film situates global capitalism as an outcome of state violence. 7 The same well-known process of actively generating legal precariousness to establish the economic precarity of the neoliberal market in Latin America also occurred in Spain (in fact, it happened in Spain and Chile at almost the same time). 8 In the film, the state’s only visible presence is a

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corrupt police force and an available, though ineffective, public health system. With a government that oscillates between its police and medical role, the film’s characters can only officially be recognized as potential criminals or patients. The public sphere offers them exchange value but not citizenship. They are not national citizens of a modern state but rather disposable bodies of capitalism. The absence of an affective father, caused by Francoism, generates a precarious and unjust society upon which late capitalism then unfolds its spectral simulacra. SPECTERS OF GLOBALIZATION Uxbal is both a medium and a middleman. As a medium he liaises between the material and spiritual worlds, making money by helping spirits cross into the afterlife. Although he attempts to represent his labor as a benevolent contribution, the film makes it clear that he takes advantage of every opportunity to protect his bottom line so that he can leave money for his children upon his death. Uxbal’s work as middleman places him at a crucial juncture of the global market, and this part of the narrative functions as a metaphor for globalization. He coordinates the transfer of a steady supply of cheap imitation luxury goods made in a Chinese-run and -employed sweatshop in Barcelona to a group of Senegalese street vendors, who have the permission of a corrupt police officer to operate in certain districts of the city. Through the representation of these undocumented immigrants and their precarious positions within cosmopolitan Barcelona, the film makes these global subalterns visible. 9 Although they are not literally ghosts, during most of the film these haunting figures remind the viewer that the materiality and fantasies of late capitalism are sustained by the slavery of legally and socially precarious bodies. While the father’s specter addresses Spain’s historical debt of memory to those persecuted by Francoism, the workers’ specters address the economic and social debt that contemporary society has to undocumented workers in the gray economy. Daniel Garrett notes how the camera that follows Uxbal’s movements throughout the streets, dingy overcrowded apartments, and spaces of undocumented labor exposes the underbelly of Barcelona’s modernity, revealing to the viewer a city that contrasts starkly with its iconic representation as a space of exciting adventure in such movies as Vicky Christina Barcelona and L’auberge espagnole. 10 Instead, viewers discover the exploitation and extreme vulnerability of global subalterns that sustains the touristic image of Barcelona. The contrast between the fantasy of Barcelona and its gritty reality is marked through undocumented workers’ differentiated access to certain key spaces. The Senegalese workers are brutally repressed for repeatedly ignoring warnings to stay out of the Plaza Cataluña. Their irruption into the

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consecrated spaces of the traditional touristic Barcelona marks a transgression for which some will die and many others will be chased, brutally beaten, imprisoned, and eventually deported. The Chinese workers, on the other hand, stay in the sweatshop out of view of Barcelona’s middle class and tourists. When they leave this space, it is to enter the construction labor market, a liminal space between the city’s underbelly and its glamorous tourist centers. While revealing that the city’s upward expansion is constructed on the backs of near-slaves, the film suggests that while illegality cannot be seen in already-demarcated spaces, it finds room in the interstices of the spaces-in-construction. The depiction of the relationship between Uxbal and these two groups of workers creates a powerful claim on the viewer to recognize that the global market is sustained by the labor of a network of modern-day slaves. By localizing these figures inside Barcelona rather than in a relegated realm of the Global South, and by linking their plots to Uxbal’s family narrative, the film insists that rather than marginal people in a distant land, they are central to the everyday workings of life in the cosmopolitan centers of the first world. The film also underscores that the lives of these workers are not regarded as valuable by the state. They suffer from precarity, that is, “the politically induced condition in which certain population suffer from failing social and economic networks of support” and “are made to bear the burden of starvation, underemployment, legal disenfranchisement, and differential exposure to violence and death.” 11 This is visible in the repression of the Senegalese workers by the police, who are not protecting Spaniards from harm but rather the image of touristic spaces from contamination. 12 The Chinese workers, too, become victims of the market. They die not for transgressing spaces like the Senegalese, but rather as a direct consequence of Uxbal protecting his bottom line. He is arguably a benevolent man reasonably concerned with the well-being of the Chinese workers. Visibly appalled at their living conditions, Uxbal nevertheless only intervenes on their behalf when the Chinese workers show up too sick from sleeping in an unheated basement to work at the construction site. He buys them heaters, but in a cost-cutting measure that would save him some money, he purchases visibly shoddy heaters that later leak gas and kill all the workers while they sleep locked in the basement. Thus, the market reduces these workers to bare life, using them as expendable bodies. While in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, the logic of sovereignty is an attribute of the modern state, in Biutiful this logic belongs to the global market. 13 For the film, the state is nothing more than an apparatus of the market, whose role is controlling (not disciplining) the social body: its police force protects the spaces and lives territorialized by the market. For this reason, there is a conspicuous absence of any social safety net that would protect the characters’ lives. This absence is confirmed by Uxbal’s concern

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that no one will look after his children after his passing. The film does not portray any shared condition of citizenship based on either political or affective bonds. The market establishes the value of every body, branding them as worthy or unworthy of life-sustaining conditions. Two haunting images highlight Uxbal’s culpability for the Senegalese’s deportation and the death of the Chinese workers: first, the wife of the leader of the Senegalese men, with whom Uxbal negotiates directly; and second, the ghosts and dead bodies of the Chinese workers. Uxbal is arrested along with the Senegalese workers, and upon his release, he visits Ige, wife of the Senegalese leader, Ekweme, and offers her cash to help while her husband is in jail. Ige rejects his offer, calling his money dirty and imploring him, “Who will take care of my baby?” reminding him of the devastating long-term consequences of his business dealings. Both are impacted by the confrontation: even though Ige accepts the money after Uxbal insists that Ekweme is responsible for his own deportation, Uxbal shows his concern for her wellbeing when he later takes her to visit Ekweme in jail and offers to let her stay in his apartment, which is vacant while he temporarily reconciles with his wife. In contrast, Uxbal is unable to make amends for his role in the Chinese workers’ deaths. Although he tries to help his babysitter Lily cross into the afterlife, he cannot face the other ghosts that are still hovering above the bodies. A distraught Uxbal seeks moral absolution from Bea, his spiritual leader, who instructs him to go back and ask for their forgiveness. He returns, but the bodies are gone. They were thrown into the sea. Later, they reappear washed up on the beach to symbolically and legally demand justice (however, the police’s actions do not reach Uxbal, but only the family of Hai, the Chinese labor boss). Just as the specter of Uxbal’s father demands symbolic justice through recognition in national history from the viewer, the bodies of the Chinese workers make demands on Uxbal and the viewer for social and economic justice. The protagonist moves from a position associated with the victim of national history to the victimizer in the present of the global market. This antagonism in Uxbal’s moral position complicates the viewer’s sympathies, producing ambivalence toward him. Uxbal, Hai and everyone else involved in the case uphold a pact of silence, and the police investigation effectively disappears for the rest of the movie. But just as the specters of political dissidents haunt Spain’s history, the film appeals to a viewer that is able to recognize how thousands of illegal and precarious workers haunt the structure of the global market and demand justice. SPECTRAL CAPITALISM The specters and haunting figures addressed up to this point function within the film to expose subaltern subjects and realms that political and economic

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violence have attempted to hide. In this section we will move from these spectral subalterns to the spectral fantasies of late capitalism, focusing on the simulacra that these fantasies produce. In the film, late capitalism instills fantasies and desires that the characters try to satisfy through routine simulacra. We approach said fantasies from Ernesto Laclau’s interpretative variant of the Derridean logic of the specter. Laclau notes that Derrida’s interpretation of hauntology (or the logic of the specter) relies on a positive view of the radical structure of the promise of justice: where there is a specter, there is a demand for justice. However, as Laclau argues, there is no direct connection between the specter and justice, or between the structure of the promise and justice. The logic of the specter is certainly a radical structure of promise. But promises are not always for justice; they can also be for other antidemocratic forms. 14 Biutiful makes remarkably clear that when the referent of the structure of promise is not a spectral subaltern, but a spectral fantasy, the demand for justice is replaced by a demand for desire. What is the role of the simulacrum within this other interpretation of the logic of the specter? Derrida’s analysis of Marx’s work is based on the latter’s conceptualization of capitalist exchange-value as spectral: “[T]he apparition of exchange-value, in Capital, is precisely an apparition, one might say a vision, a hallucination, a properly spectral apparition.” 15 Antonio Negri explains that within Marxism, the spectral feature of exchange-value emerges from “the abstraction of value, which in a bloodless movement, vampirizes all the worker’s labor and, transforming itself into surplus-value, becomes capital.” In order to demystify this “spectral movement” of capitalism “one must take . . . into account the method of production and exchange, analyze the powerful falsification of the centrality of the worker’s labor that takes place therein.” 16 In other words, Derrida’s positive, messianic interpretation of the specter stems from the Marxist objective of making visible the materiality of labor hidden by exchange-value’s spectrality. However, the logic of the specter that Derrida elaborated goes beyond political economy. His theory “corresponds with common experience: an experience of the everyday, and/or of the masses.” 17 Thus, the logic of spectrality moves from the market in Marx to the realm of culture in Derrida. And if the specter manifests itself through exchange-value within the market, its manifestation within the realm of culture is through simulacra. Jo Labanyi accurately discerns that within Derrida’s ideas there is a connection between the “virtual space of spectrality” and the simulacrum of postmodernism (the culture associated with late capitalism). 18 As Fredric Jameson explains, engaging with Jean Baudrillard’s ideas, “the repetitive structure of . . . the simulacrum . . . characterizes the commodity production of consumer capitalism and marks our object world with an unreality and a free-floating absence of the ‘referent.” 19 The fantasies of capitalism are precisely the space of said absent referent whose spectrality stems from its own

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free-floating absence. Thus, the fantasies function as specters that haunt people, producing in them insatiable desires that they try to satisfy through simulacra of those fantasies and that ultimately drive them to commodity consumption. With this in mind, we have devoted the remainder of this section to examining capitalism’s spectrality from this alternative interpretation of the logic of the specter, where the structure of the promise gives way to the structure of desire. The work of capitalist desire and simulacra in the film is clearest in Marambra’s character. If Uxbal’s father’s specter represents the unfinished task of national mourning for the victims of Francoism, the mother’s character and her bipolarity illustrate the working of late capitalism in people’s everyday lives through spectral cultural fantasies. Marambra is presented as bipolar, a psychopathology that is alluded to in the plot as well as in certain strategies of representation. Her connection with capitalist fantasies is established visually in her first appearance on screen. She is drunk, dressed in nothing but a g-string, wine glass and a cigarette in hand, dancing to Café Tacuba’s pop rendition of “Amor divino” [Divine love]. Her lover Tito awakens to a phone call regarding an urgent matter of family business: a shopping mall is to be built over his father’s gravesite, and he and his brother decide to seize the opportunity to sell it. The viewer discovers later that Marambra and Tito are Uxbal’s estranged wife and brother, respectively. Marambra’s body rising vertically over Tito, prancing carefree across his back, is a metaphoric visualization of the shopping mall that will be built over the cemetery where Tito’s and Uxbal’s father lies. Thus, this scene links the projected shopping mall’s consumerist promise of a happy present with Marambra’s sexualized body. Various scenes of family dinners reinforce the identification between Marambra and capitalist fantasies. In the first, Uxbal and the children sit in the dark, sparsely furnished, silent dining room of his apartment. While Uxbal cooks fried fish for them, Ana and Mateo complain that they always eat the same thing. To lighten the mood, Uxbal pretends to be a waiter in a restaurant and asks them what they would prefer. Mateo asks for a hamburger and fries while Ana asks for sausage and a Spanish omelet. The loving father pretends to fulfill their requests while serving them cereal and milk instead of fish. The children play along with this simulacrum of a happy middle-class family dinner and laugh as they eat their imaginary meals. The ideal family dinner at home is impossible because of the absence of their mother. The dinner in a restaurant simulates a completely absent referent, and their performance is an attempt to recreate the referent. Their efforts to fulfill the demands of the fantasy reveal the spectral logic of capitalist fantasies. The simulacrum exposes how incongruent these fantasies are with the characters’ actual emotional and material conditions. This incongruence will eventually provoke a rupture: Mateo breaks the implicit rules of the simulacrum when

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he repeatedly kicks the table leg and stuffs too much food into his mouth. A stressed out Uxbal yells and sends him straight to bed. The rupture of the simulacrum is a symptom of the spectral nature that these fantasies of capitalism have over people’s everyday lives: the simulacrum cannot fulfill the fantasies. In subsequent dinners, Marambra will attempt to fulfill them, mobilizing the simulacrum once more. In the second dinner, she attempts to play the role of loving mother and responsible housewife, cooking pasta for the whole family and tending to Uxbal’s laundry. The dinner takes place in the same dinning room, now more brightly lit. However, as in the previous dinner, Uxbal is too tense, and when Marambra talks relentlessly—a symptom of her mania—he orders her to leave. Again, the simulacrum fails and the fantasies cannot be fulfilled. The next family meal takes place after the parents have reconciled. After his brief imprisonment for his affiliation with the Senegalese workers, Uxbal recognizes that he can no longer take care of his children alone. Although he intuits that Marambra is not fully stable, he needs to believe that his children can rely on her, so they move in with her. This meal takes place in Marambra’s sun-drenched apartment, where the simulacrum of the fantasy is finally uninterrupted. They eat ice cream, make plans to go camping, talk about getting a dog, and share stories of when Marambra and Uxbal met. Uxbal even agrees to take a family vacation to the Pyrenees Mountains for Ana’s upcoming birthday. For this fleeting moment, it seems that they will be a happy family. The promise of the fantasy appears to be fulfilled. However, the tensions between Uxbal and Marambra grow over time, especially when the symptoms of her bipolarity worsen. The next dinner, which lasts just a few seconds on the screen, takes place at night in her dimly lit apartment. She smokes while the rest remain silent so as not to upset her. In the background, mocking the scene and making visible the failure of the idealized family, the chorus of Los auténticos decadentes’ song “A mi me vuelve loco tu forma de ser” [The way you are drives me crazy] can be heard. The simulacrum of the fantasy is broken again and its spectral nature reinforced: it is a desire that is absent, not a reality. In a later argument between Uxbal and Marambra, in which he accuses her of abusing Mateo and of spending the night out, she changes her mood constantly and only partially addresses his concerns. She babbles about how beautiful the stars are in the dark sky, cries about how Mateo disrespects her, and talks happily about their upcoming family vacation to the Pyrenees. Defeated, Uxbal leaves the argument, asserting that the stars she sees are not actual stars, but her nervous system. The pathological relationship that Uxbal establishes between Marambra’s imagined stars and her actual nervous system is a metaphor for the divergence between late capitalism’s fantasies and the materiality of the modes of production. Through this metaphor, the film suggests the pathological and spectral nature

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of the fantasies: the possibility of imagining and fulfilling them stems from the psychological and physical deterioration of the body. Uxbal and his children finally abandon Marambra. For the next family dinner, they are again in their old poorly lit apartment, but now Ige and her baby Samuel join them. The scene opens with Ige breastfeeding her son, which represents the key maternal role that she will play for the future of Uxbal’s children. The spectral fantasy of the ideal family is broken entirely. Uxbal and his children, as well as Ige and her son, have to adjust to the new materiality of their lives, which is reflected in a scene in which Ana and Mateo return home after school: they walk on one side of the street while Ige carries her baby on the other. Little by little, Ige crosses the street and walks behind them while they constantly turn their heads to stare at her, adjusting uneasily to her new role in their lives. In the last family dinner, Uxbal explains gently that Marambra is in a mental health clinic. His explanation of Marambra’s condition functions as an attempt to conjure her absence. Then, they all celebrate Ana’s birthday with a cake and sing “happy birthday:” a last attempt to repeat the simulacrum. After the song is over, he gives his children two stones that Bea, his spiritual leader, gave him for their protection. His pleading tone when he asks his children to save the stones rouses Ana’s suspicion about her father’s health, thus breaking the simulacrum again. At the same time that Uxbal tries to conjure Marambra’s absence, he exposes the uncertainty of his own presence because of his impending death. He becomes a specter. The last family dinner is a time of disjunction: not only is the spectral fantasy of the ideal family now impossible, a rearrangement of the members, related and unrelated, will be necessary for their survival. Marambra’s character is a metaphor for a kind of society in which consumerist pleasure is grounded in a collective psychopathology of self-destruction. Her bipolarity is a symptom of the contradictory and unhealthy behaviors produced by the fantasies of late capitalism. As the analysis of the family dinners make clear, capitalism pushes people into a bipolar oscillation between simulacra of fantasies and incompatible material conditions. The simulacrum is nothing more than the haunting return of the specter of capitalism. Like Marambra, every character in Biutiful is haunted by some kind of fantasy that he or she attempts—largely unsuccessfully—to fulfill. Uxbal, for example, strives to maintain his image as a good father, successful provider, and benevolent intermediary. Hai, the Chinese labor boss, also seeks to uphold his image as a good husband and businessman, but he cannot resist being seduced by Liwei, his long-time male lover. Like Marambra in her manic moments, Tito lives by the hedonistic code of businessman and playboy, the only fantasy that remains largely undisturbed throughout the film. Ige, on the other hand, attempts to fulfill the immigrant’s fantasy of offering her son better opportunities than he would have had in Senegal. In one way

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or another, the film topples these fantasies and makes their precariousness visible. CULTURAL AGENCY IN PERIPHERAL MODERNITY In the last section, we focused on how the spectral fantasies of capitalism haunt the everyday lives of the characters. In this section we address these characters’ agency for re-appropriating these fantasies. The failure of Uxbal’s family’s fantasies makes it necessary for him to depend on Ige to care for his children and to ensure their future survival. While Uxbal gives her all of his money and pleads with her to informally adopt Ana and Mateo, Ige prefers to return to Senegal and reunite with her husband. For a brief moment, Uxbal’s family’s future hangs in the balance when Ige takes a bag full of money to the train station. She apparently changes her mind about abandoning Ana and Mateo, for she returns later that evening. However, her presence is spectral: neither Uxbal nor the viewer sees her. While Uxbal is experiencing a morphine-induced delirium, we see only Ige’s shadow and hear her muted voice. This last spectral image of Ige reflects her own demand for justice, her own agential capacity. No one can be sure which role or which fantasy she will decide to carry out. It is only certain that if she stays, the cycle will continue: her infant son will grow up without knowing his father, just as Uxbal did. Each family’s persistence in the fantasy of Barcelona relies on the fragmentation of both. However, Ige’s final spectral presence can be interpreted beyond her social precariousness. It can also be seen as a representation of her capacity to subvert the fantasies, breaking the pact with Uxbal’s family and moving elsewhere. An allegorical reading of the characters’ names and the film’s title also evokes the capacity to re-appropriate fantasies. The names of each generation remit to the different periods in which they were raised. The non-Castilian names Uxbal and Marambra reveal an agency that reinforces regional identities instead of a normative Castilian identity, which Francoism sought to impose in Barcelona in the 1960s. As González Iñárritu explains, during those years “Franco apoyó la emigración a Cataluña de cientos de miles de personas procedentes de toda España, en un intento de romper la cultura catalana y reforzar la prohibición de hablar catalán” 20 [Franco encouraged the migration to Cataluña of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards from all around the country, as an attempt to break the Catalan culture and reinforce the prohibition to speak Catalan]. Those migrants settled in peripheral Barcelona suburbs like Santa Coloma de Gramenet, where most of the film is set. Considering that Uxbal and Marambra are likely descendants of those migrants due to the chronological organization of the film, their names constitute a transgression of Franco’s power and his nationalist project. On the

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contrary, Ana and Mateo, both biblical names, call to mind Francoist Spain’s Catholic nationalist culture. As Paloma Aguilar Fernández states, Franco’s “aim was to obtain traditional legitimacy . . . by presenting Francoism . . . as the executor of the Catholic and Spanish imperial tradition.” 21 However it is noteworthy that Uxbal’s children would have been born under democracy. Thus, their names suggest the continuation of Francoist culture, or at least part of it, under the Transición and democracy. As a third example, the name of Ige’s and Ekweme’s son, Samuel, reflects the fantasy of the global market: Ige explains to Mateo that he was named after Samuel Eto’o, the Cameroon player on the Barcelona soccer team. It is precisely that fantasy of an African immigrant’s success in Barcelona that the couple tries to fulfill. Through the name Samuel, Ekweme and Ige territorialize themselves and their baby within the imaginary of Barcelona. Finally, the title of the film itself is a peripheral reproduction of the fantasies of the global market. “Biutiful”—a phonetic spelling of “beautiful” that Uxbal instructs Ana to write when she is completing her English homework—can be read as the subaltern’s cultural agency to re-appropriate capitalist fantasies (taking into consideration that the teaching of English in millions of schools around the world is due to its prestige as the language that dominates international politics and economics). The fact that the misspelled word serves as the title of the movie refers to the importance of subalternity and cultural agency to break and reappropriate the spectral fantasies of late capitalism. The film makes of the characters’ peripheral knowledge and experiences a central realm to reflect on capitalist society. CONCLUSION: THE ROLE OF THE VIEWER Marvin A. Carlson emphasizes the importance of the viewer’s cultural and social memory for a haunted text’s reception, noting that the arts actively frame content to stimulate certain receptions based on previous experiences or memories. 22 We believe that Biutiful’s framing also relies on the viewer’s conscious or unconscious fantasies to inform its reception. The film appeals to and demands an ideal viewer that recognizes the spectral condition of those subjects marginalized by Spain’s official history and the global market. Furthermore, the movie appeals to a spectator that finds him or herself subject to the same structures of power that subject the characters and who, consequently, shares with them the same fantasies and simulacra. One of the affective effects of the film is sadness, which relies on the viewer lamenting the failure of the fantasies he or she shares with the characters. The spectator’s reactions are guided by Uxbal’s lamentation when he finds out about his illness, his cry when the Chinese workers die, his anger toward the abusive police officers, and Ana’s fear when she realizes that her father is dying. The viewer’s sadness may reinforce the desire for such fantasies, hoping that the

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characters attain a happy family, material security, and physical health at the end. But the spectator can also recognize the spectral nature of those capitalist fantasies, seeing what is hidden within them: the exploitation, torn families, and shattered dreams that they require, as well as the pathological selfdestruction they produce. This process demands that the viewer be aware of his or her own role and responsibility within the structures of power that produce subalternity, as well as to confront his or her own shared spectral condition within those structures. NOTES 1. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Armando Bó, Jr, and Nicolás Giacobone, Biutiful. Directed by González Iñárritu, DVD (Barcelona and Catalonia, Spain: Menage Atroz, 2011). 2. Laura M. Kanost, “Translating Ghosts: Reading ‘Cambio De Armas’ and ‘Other Weapons’ as Haunted Texts,” Chasqui 37, no. 2 (April–June 2008): 86. 3. Specters (1994), xix. 4. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, quoted in Specters (1994), 29. 5. The film offers no concrete details about when or why the father was persecuted. Uxbal only offers that his father had to escape because “he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. And at that time Franco persecuted and killed people who didn’t keep their mouth shut.” 6. Jo Labanyi, “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period,” in Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), 80. 7. This aspect of Biutiful parallels González Iñárritu’s filmic exploration of the connection between the 1970s revolutionary period in Mexico and neoliberalism in Guillermo Arriaga’s Amores perros, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, DVD (México, DF: Altavista Films, 2000). For a study of this relationship, see Dierdra Reber, “Love as Politics: Amores Perros and the Emotional Aesthetics of Neoliberalism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (December 2010): 279–98. 8. The transition from dictatorship to global market has been studied by scholars such as Francine Masiello, in The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Nelly Richard, in Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition, trans. Alan West-Durán and Theodore Quester (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); and Susana Draper, in Afterlives of Confinement: Spatial Transitions in Postdictatorship Latin America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). 9. Our use of the term “precarious” and attention to why some bodies are more exposed to violence than others draws from Judith Butler’s ethical texts on violence. See Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009); and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004). 10. Daniel Garrett, “Not Beautiful but Brutal, Ugly Facts and Transcendence in Inarritu’s film Biutiful: The Death of the Body, the Survival of the Spirit,” Offscreen.com 15, no. 8 (August 2011), http://offscreen.com/view/inarritus_biutiful (accessed March 3, 2013); Vicky Cristina Barcelona, written and directed by Woody Allen, DVD (New York: Weinstein Co.; Santa Monica, CA: Genius Products, 2008); and L’Auberge Espagnole, written and directed by Cédric Klapisch, DVD (Issy-les-Moulineaux, France and Spain: Studio Canal, 2002). 11. Butler, Frames of War, 25. 12. In his article exposing the link between biopolitics and global repressive military and police actions, Leerom Medovoi notes that even under the purported “peace” of globalization, the police continue to play a crucial role in protecting life deemed worth living: the “violence [of the 1990s] was always effaced by the need for regulation. For once, global exercises of

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biopower disavowed almost entirely the military character of their project. Economic violence was merely ‘structural adjustment,’ every apparent war only a police action, every conflict with some ‘way of life’ a managing of risk to the global social body” (“Global Society Must Be Defended: Biopolitics Without Boundaries,” Social text 91, no. 2 [Summer 2007]: 66). 13. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 14. Ernesto Laclau, “The Time is Out of Joint,” in Emancipation(s) (London and New York: Verso, 1996), 73–79. 15. Specters (1994), 46. 16. Antonio Negri, “The Specter’s Smile,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michel Sprinker (London and New York: Verso, 2008), 7. 17. Negri, “The Specter’s Smile,” 9. 18. Labanyi, “History and Hauntology,” 66. 19. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (Winter 1979): 135. 20. Alejandro González Iñárritu, “Acerca de la película,” La higuera.net, n.d. http://www. lahiguera.net/cinemania/pelicula/4360/comentario.php (accessed August 6, 2013). 21. Paloma Aguilar Fernández, Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy, trans. Mark Oakley (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2002), 39. 22. Marvin A. Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 5.

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Index

Abraham, Nicolas, 108, 112 Agamben, Giorgio, 18, 20, 26–27, 27, 28, 34, 43 Agosín, Marjorie, 17 Aguilar Fernández, Paloma, 212 Ahmed, Sarah, 142, 143 Alianza Argentina Anti-Comunista, 89 Álvarez, Julia, 19–20 Amenábar, Alejandro, 101; The Others (film), 101, 113n2 Americas (-ans), 64, 184; capitalism in, 8–9; Central, 58, 166, 187–190, 192, 194, 198; conquest of, 6; Cuba, 51; European projection, 176, 177; Guatemala, 14, 48, 50, 51, 58; Latin America, 4, 10n4, 10n6, 14, 18, 51, 58, 76, 98n3, 118, 157–158, 161, 163n21, 170, 187, 191, 203; North, 10n4, 170; Spanish, 158; Uruguay, 65, 69; Venezuela, 184; United States (US), 33, 47, 52, 53–54, 58, 60n42, 69. See also civil war; ghosts; modernism Amigo Cerisola, Roberto, 73 Aparecidos. See Cabezas Árbenz, Jacobo, 51–52 archive(s), 85, 133, 152, 154, 155, 162n6, 166, 169, 182–184; Achivo Fotográfico de Memoria Abierta. See Memoria Abierta Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. See Alianza Argentina Anti-Comunista

Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. See Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense Arias, Arturo, 58, 59n15, 190 Armengou, Montse, 110 Asturias, Miguel Ángel, 187 asylum, 152, 153, 158, 162n6; La Castañeda (mental asylum), 152, 154, 160 Auxilio Social, 110–112 Avelar, Idelber, 8–9, 18, 28, 161 Azoulay, Ariella, 139, 140, 141, 149n23 Bal, Mieke, 128 Balzac, Honoré de, 41, 42 Barrientos, Tanya María, 14, 47–59; Family resemblance, 14, 48, 51, 56 Barthes, Roland, 134, 140, 149n16, 152, 155 Bayona, Juan Antonio, 101; El orfanato, 65, 101–113, 114n11, 114n23, 115n38 Belis, Ricard, 110 Belli, Gioconda, 188 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 37, 139, 151–152, 161, 163n23 Bergson, Henri, 92 Bignone, Reynaldo, 97 Biutiful. See González Iñárritu Blanco, María Pilar, 2, 48, 171 Borges, Jorge Luis, 34, 36–37, 41, 45n25, 71, 163n21 231

232

Index

Brogan, Kathleen, 72–73 Brooks, Peter, 119 Buse, Peter, 88, 94–95, 98n10 Cabezas, Paco, 65, 85, 98n1; Aparecidos (film), 65, 85–98, 98n1 “La canción de Lord Rendall.”. See Marías capital (-ism;-ist), 8–9, 13, 119, 165, 166, 170, 178, 187, 191–192, 194, 198, 201–213; culture of, 9; economic, 9, 198; expansion, 189; global, 9, 64, 167, 191–192, 199n41; liberal, 13; logic, 3; neoliberal, 9; transnational, 9. See also Núñez, Cubagua; neoliberalism Carlson, Marvin A., 212 Caruth, Cathy, 63, 70–71, 74, 82n21, 86, 88, 89–90, 92, 94 La Castañeda. See asylum Central America. See Americas Certeau, Michel de, 98n10, 188 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 94 Cixous, Hélène, 102 civil war, 64, 179; Guatemala, 53–54; Spain, 34, 38, 85, 101, 102, 105–106, 111, 148n4, 203. See also Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista La Cocha (lake), 121, 123, 126 Coddou, Marcelo, 76 Colmeiro, José, 102, 103, 113n3, 115n38 colonial (-ism; -ty), 4, 142, 145, 166, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 187–188; counter-, 181, 183–184; desire, 142, 145, 177; history, 143; neo-, 146, 166, 170, 171, 181, 183; post-, 87, 140, 145, 146, 175; Spanish, 179; wars, 142 Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP), 19 Contreras Castro, Fernando, 190 Corazón tan blanco. See Marías Cortez, Beatriz, 189 Cuba. See Americas Cubagua. See Núñez Davis, Colin, 3, 10n10, 48, 56, 108, 153, 158 De Robertis, Carolina, 65, 67–68, 69, 71, 72, 75, 78, 81, 82n29; The Invisible Mountain, 69, 72; Perla, 67–81

Del Toro, Guillermo, 101, 106, 111, 115n38 Deleuze, Gilles, 117, 124, 125; A Thousand Plateaus, 124 Delgadillo, Theresa, 55 Derrida, Jacques, 2–3, 13, 18, 24, 25, 27, 28, 31n50, 35, 50, 86, 91, 94, 95–96, 102, 106, 108, 117, 124, 126, 128, 153, 158, 161, 202, 207; Specters of Marx, 2, 24, 27, 95–96, 126. See also specter “A Desalambrar” (community organization), 137–138 desaparecidos, 85, 122. See also disappearance, forced desire, 14, 22, 36, 37, 56, 58, 118–120, 124, 127, 137, 143–144, 145–146, 160, 165, 167, 176, 178, 189, 190–192, 193–197, 201, 207, 208, 209, 212. See also colonial Díaz Zambrana, Rosana, 5, 86 Diccionario esotérico. See Echeverría dictatorship. See Franco; Pinochet “La dimisión de Santiesteban.”. See Marías Dirty War: in Argentina, 67–81, 85–98; in Guatemala, 47–59 disappear (-ance, -ed, -ing), 4, 5, 18, 19, 22, 27, 29, 42, 63–134, 106, 111, 121–123, 125, 140, 161, 203, 206; and colonialism, 145; forced, 17–30, 54–55, 64, 67–81, 85–98, 126; haunted, 22–27; and ghosts, 86, 89, 126, 128; un-, 59 disposable (-ility), 9, 141, 204 Dubois, Philippe, 139 Dussel, Enrique, 6 Echeverría, Maurice, 166, 187, 190, 198; Diccionario esotérico, 166, 187–198 Los ejércitos. See Rosero Eltit, Diamela, 5 Los enamoramientos. See Marías Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense, 17 El espinazo del diablo. See Toro expendable (-ility), 144, 145, 165, 205 exploitation (-tive), 85, 120, 172, 175, 177; capitalist, 201, 204, 213; economic, 47–48; genre, 65, 118–119; migrant, 134, 138; oil, 170, 179; and photography 8.34-8.35; physical, 192

Index Family resemblance. See Barrientos fog, 122–123, 125–126 Ford Falcon, 78, 87, 88 Franco Ramos, Jorge, 119 Franco, Francisco, 34–35, 101, 202, 211–212, 213n5; death of, 87, 111; dictatorship of, 34, 87, 110, 111, 112–113, 113n4, 115n38, 148n4, 202, 202–204, 208, 211–212; post-Franco (ism, -ist), 7, 14, 97 Franco, Jean, 4 Franco Ramos, Jorge, 119 Francoism (-ists). See Franco, Francisco, dictatorship of Freud, Sigmund, 36, 90, 105, 114n24; The Uncanny, 63 Fuguet, Alberto, 191 Gabara, Esther, 159, 163n43 Galich, Franz, 190 Gallegos, Rómulo, 169–170 Gamboa, Federico, 156, 157 García Benito, Nieves, 141, 148n8 García Espinosa, Julio, 118 Getino, Octavio, 118 ghost(s): and absence, 3, 5, 51, 67–71, 187; and capitalism, 165–167, 201–213; child, 65, 101–112; and coloniality, 173, 181, 183; and geography, 117–128; and globalization, 201–213; and history, 14, 42, 59, 72, 89, 102, 128, 153, 153–154, 166, 180; and horror, 5, 8, 102; and justice, 3, 14, 33, 38, 41, 43, 50, 65, 102, 113, 202; and market economy, 71, 165–167, 201–212; and material remains, 26, 27, 28; and modernity, 6, 153, 159; and myths, 141, 176, 181–183; and the Other, 6; and photography, 37, 133–135, 137–147, 148n8, 151–161, 162n8; and repetition, 103, 107, 113; and silence, 3, 123, 147, 153, 175, 182; story, 33, 36, 43, 48, 72, 76, 88, 96, 105–107, 147, 177, 179, 180, 181, 183; and theory, 2–6, 56; and trauma, 3, 34, 38, 43, 50, 63–65, 72, 86, 94, 96, 102, 175, 182; and violence, 4, 5, 48, 56, 72, 75, 102, 106, 114n17. See also memory; haunting; simulacrum; time

233

Ghostly Matters. See Gordon Gilii, Salvatore, 177, 182 Giménez, Carlos, 111–112 Global South, 189, 205 glue-sniffing. See pegamentero Gómez, Juan Vicente, 170, 171, 178, 185n9 Gómez, Sergio, 191 Gómez López-Quiñones, Antonio, 139 Gómez Valbuena, Sor María, 115n39 González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 201, 211, 213n7; Biutiful (film), 166, 201–213, 213n7 Gordon, Avery F., 3, 13, 35, 48–50, 68, 81, 106–107, 138, 140, 153, 154, 187; Ghostly Matters, 3, 48, 138, 153 Grandin, Greg, 51 Guatemala. See Americas Guatemalan Civil War. See civil war Guattari, Felix, 117, 124, 125 guilt(-y), 71, 94, 119, 125 Guzmán, Patricio, 25; Nostalgia de la luz, 25, 28 Hall, Stuart, 7 Hartley, L. P., 160 haunt (-ing), 3; as aesthetic, 8, 9–10, 126; affective recognition, 140; by creatures, 74; and crisis, 5; cultural, 68, 77, 102, 148n4; and death, 76, 79; of the disappeared, 24, 68, 78, 81, 87; in films and novels, 36, 37, 67, 72, 80, 94–95, 109, 112–113, 118–121, 155, 171, 177, 201–206; by guilt, 125; hauntography, 175, 182–184; histories, 13–14; house, 35; and immigrants, 137–138; and justice, 38, 95, 97, 102; as metaphor, 181; modern narratives, 4; of objects, 25, 27–28, 29; and orphanages, 102; and the past, 18, 24, 39, 51, 56–59, 175; political violence, 47–48, 54; postEnlightenment, 3; and psychoanalysis, 10n10, 36, 52; relationship to space, 103; and residue, 7–8; as rupture, 3, 6–9; and secrets, 102, 108–109, 111; stories, 105–107, 181; theory of, 115n38; Transhispanic studies, 3, 6; and violence, 2, 38, 63–66, 68, 79, 86, 90, 96, 149n28, 171, 182; visor effect,

234

Index

91; by voices, 158, 174. See also capitalism; disappeared; ghost; justice; lost; Marx; memory; Peter Pan; specter; uncanny Higienismo (-ista) (social policy), 155–161 Hirsch, Marianne, 5, 38, 50, 51, 53–54, 64, 81 La historia oficial (film), 91 HIV, 103–104, 108 Hoffman, Eva, 75 Holocaust. See studies homuncula, 197 Hornstein, Luis, 77 Humboldt, Alexander von, 177 immigrant (s, -tion), 58, 69, 134, 137–147, 148n2, 148n7–148n8, 150n40, 175, 199n41, 201–213 Injustice. See justice The Invisible Mountain. See De Robertis Jameson, Fredric, 207 Jonas, Susanne, 51 justice, 2, 8, 18, 33, 39, 40, 50, 56, 59, 65, 70, 96–97, 106, 189, 207; concepts for, 97; demand for, 59, 202, 206, 207, 211; economic, 206; for victims, 3; in-, 36, 38, 41, 43, 48, 91, 94–96, 107, 113, 118, 119, 202–203; Ministry of, 110; Palace of, 89; posthumous, 14, 34; search of, 58, 102–103, 108; symbolic, 206; unresolved, 14 Kaminsky, Amy, 94 Kanost, Laura M., 157, 202 Kokotovic, Misha, 189 Kolnai, Aurel, 190 Kozameh, Alicia, 21, 22; Pasos bajo el agua, 21 Krauss, Rosalind E., 156 Labanyi, Jo, 6, 8, 35, 38–39, 97, 106–107, 148n4, 203, 207 LaCapra, Dominick, 64, 74 Laclau, Ernesto, 207 Latin America. See Americas En el lejero. See Rosero Ley de la Memoria Histórica (Spain), 35 Lim, Bliss Cua, 87, 92, 94

Linhard, Tabea Alexa, 140 Lorenzano, Sandra, 67, 69, 73 lost, 24, 26, 43, 52, 53, 140, 146; Boys, 109–110, 111; children, 102, 109–111; histories, 5, 9, 115n38; girls, 109; See also Peter Pan Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. See Plaza de Mayo Maghreb, 138, 141, 142, 145–146, 147; relationship with Spain, 138, 141, 146 Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí. See Marías maravilloso (literary genre), 183 Marías, Javier, 14, 33–44, 45n35, 45n38; “La canción de Lord Rendall”, 37; Corazón tan blanco, 33, 36, 38, 40, 41; “La dimisión de Santiesteban”, 37; Los enamoramientos, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42–43; Mañana en la batalla piensa en mí, 36, 38; Negra espalda del tiempo, 37; El siglo, 38; Todas las almas, 37; Tu rostro mañana, 37–39, 41; “La vida y la muerte de Marcelino Iturriaga”, 33; Vidas escritas, 37–38 Martín Corrales, Eloy, 142 Martínez, Tomás Eloy, 65, 67–68, 69, 75–76, 77, 78, 81; La pasión según Trelew, 80; Purgatorio, 65, 67–81 Marx, Karl, 18, 24, 25, 28, 165, 207; Marxism (-ist), 13, 207; See also Derrida Masiello, Francine, 17, 160, 213n8 Mayolo, Carlos, 118–119, 120 McClintock, Anne, 142, 145, 148n10 McGinn, Colin, 189, 190 melancholia, 174, 178 Memoria Abierta, xiv, 23, 25, 29, 31n33; Vestigios, 17, 22–23, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29 memory, 17–30; collective, 35, 48, 142, 160; counter-, 153, 158, 162n9; cultural, 77, 80–81, 212; curse of, 36; death and, 34, 41, 43, 87, 133; ghosts and, 35, 72; haunting, 89, 94, 108; historical, 7, 34, 35, 50, 51, 65, 71, 85–86, 89, 92, 97, 101, 114n23, 115n38, 152, 169, 203, 204; and justice, 50; incomplete/fragmented, 27, 154,

Index 160; loss of, 128; and modernity, 161; neurology and, 23; objects and, 25, 151; politics of, 35, 161, 203; post-, 5, 38, 50, 50–51, 53–56, 64, 68, 77; projects, 22; reconstructing, 22; and retelling, 152; role of photographs, 154; study of, 34, 35; trauma, 74; of victims, 4, 17, 35; of violence, 5, 38, 94, 115n39, 203; virtual space, 23. See also ghosts; studies; Marías Menchú Tum, Rigoberta, 58 Menem, Carlos, 97 Merrim, Stephanie, 183 Mitchell, W. J. T., 155, 163n23 modernismo (literary movement), 158, 159, 188 modernity (-ism; -ism), 170, 183; postmodernism, 207. See also ghosts, modernity Moller, Jonathan, xiv, 49, 53, 56, 57, 57–58 Moor, 141–142, 144, 146, 149n22, 149n28 Moreiras, Cristina, 6, 7 Muñoz Lorente, Gerardo, 137, 138, 139, 143, 147; Ramito de hierbabuena, 134, 137–147; Takebitnanaa , 138 Nadie me verá llorar. See Rivera Garza Nava, Gregory, 47–48; El Norte (film), 47–48, 58 necrophilia, 77–78, 81 Negra espalda del tiempo. See Marías neocolonial (-ism). See colonial neoliberal (-ism), 64, 188–189, 190, 194, 198, 198n8, 203, 213n7; capitalism, 9, 199n41; episteme. See neoliberalism, philosophy of; ideology; neoliberalism, philosophy of; morality, 166; noir, 189; narrative, 165; philosophy of, 191–192, 197–198; policies, 5–6, 188, 193; practice of, 195, 199n41; reforms, 119; state, 137. See also capitalism los niños perdidos. See lost El Norte. See Nava North America. See Americas Nostalgia de la luz. See Guzmán Nueva Cádiz, 171, 172–174, 175, 177, 182–184

235

Núñez, Enrique Bernardo, 166, 169–171, 173–174, 177, 180–184, 185n23, 185n26; Cubagua, 169–184 Oggioni, Sofia, 126 oil, 170, 171–172, 175, 178, 179, 181, 184. See also exploitation El orfanato. See Bayona Osorio, Jaime: El páramo (film), 117, 121–123, 124–125, 127 Ospina, Luis, 118–119, 120 The Others. See Amenábar Owens, Craig, 87 Parkin-Gounelas, Ruth, 95 Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), 45n35. See also civil war, Spain Partnoy, Alicia, 19–21, 22; The Little School, 19, 20 La Pasión según Trelew. See Martínez Pasos bajo el agua. See Kozameh Patronato de San Pablo, 110 pedophilia, 195 Pedro Páramo. See Rulfo Peeren, Esther, 2, 48 pegamentero (glue sniffer), 193–194, 197 Perilli, Carmen, 5, 7 Perla. See DeRobertis Peter Pan, 104–105, 109. See also lost petrostate, 166, 170, 171, 181, 184 phantasmagoria, 171, 182 Pinochet, César Augusto, 14, 25–26. See also Franco, dictatorship Plaza de Mayo, 69, 73, 74; Madres de la, 4, 94 Popol Vuh, 55 Porfiriato, 152–153, 157–158 Porno-violencia, 119, 128. See also pornomiseria pornomiseria, 65, 118 positivism (-ist), 155, 170, 207 postcolonial. See colonial postmemory. See memory postmodernism. See modernity POUM. See Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista precarity, 203, 205 Purgatorio. See Martínez

236

Index

purgatory, 78–79 Ramírez, Sergio, 188 Ramito de hierbabuena. See Muñoz Lorente Rank, Otto, 36 Rashkin, Esther, 108, 112 Repetition (-ive), 27, 36, 41, 68, 76, 94–95, 101, 103, 107, 113, 149n28, 155; of destiny, 41; and Freud, 63; of history, 149n28, 171, 173, 175, 178; of human events, 41. See also ghosts and repetition; simulacrum and repetition. Resina, Joan Ramon, 35 Restrepo, Laura, 119 Ribeiro de Menezes, Alison, 115n38 Richard, Nelly, 6, 6–7 Ríos Montt, Efraín, 14, 60n41 Rivera Garza, Cristina, xiv, 1, 134–135, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 155–158, 159, 161, 162n6, 162n11, 163n23; Nadie me verá llorar, 134, 151–161 Rivera, José Eustasio, 118 Rocha, Glauber, 118 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis, 35 Rojas, Arístides, 169, 174, 177, 179, 182–184 Ros, Ana, 53 Rosero, Evelio, 117, 121, 122, 123, 127, 128, 130n33; Los ejércitos (film), 117–128; En el lejero (film), 117–128 Rueda, María Helena, 118, 121, 124 Rulfo, Juan, 1, 4, 10n5; Pedro Páramo, 1–2, 4, 10n5 Scarry, Elaine, 19 Scilingo, Adolfo, 71–72, 82n29 scopophilic, 119, 120, 124, 127 Sellers-García, Sylvia, 48, 56, 58, 60n42; When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, 47–59 Shohat, Robert, 139 sicaresca, 119, 129n12 El siglo. See Marías “Siluetazo” (Silhouette Protest), 73 Silverman, Kaja, 127 Simulacrum, 166–167, 177, 182, 204, 207–210, 212; Repetition of, 201, 207 sinister, 5, 101. See also uncanny

La sirga. See Vega Smith, Adam, 165 Smith, Adrian, 188 Smith, Paul Julian, 115n38 Solanas, Fernando, 118 Sontag, Susan, 8, 149n23, 155 Spain (Spanish), 4, 8, 10n4, 33, 34, 35–36, 38, 41, 44n3, 44n10, 60n42, 85, 86–87, 97, 101–102, 103, 105, 109–111, 111, 111–112, 112, 113, 113n2, 114n23, 115n38, 134, 137, 138, 138–139, 140, 141–142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 149n22, 149n28, 149n30–150n31, 171, 175, 177, 185n12, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 212; Spanish America (-n). See Americas; cinema, 65, 113n2; Civil War; civil war; colonialism; colonialism; culture, 102, 134, 138, 140, 141, 142, 148n4; empire, 142, 170, 212; history, 202; images, 142; language, 10n4, 50, 51–52, 55, 58, 75, 85, 88, 109, 123, 129n12, 130n33; literature, 7, 202; man, 139, 143, 144, 145; press, 60n42, 112, 113n4, 115n40, 138, 148n7, 202; society, 34, 35, 65, 140, 202; Transition; Transition (political) specter(s; -al), 1–3, 13, 36, 41, 128, 170, 201–213, 213n12; aesthetic. See haunting, as aesthetic; critical discussion, 6; criticism; ghosts, theory; dimension, 42; difference with ghosts, 86, 95–98; of globalizations, 204–206; to haunt, 134, 208; of Karl Marx, 18–19, 28; logic of, 208; and market economy, 165–167; spatiality, 65, 118; study of, 35, 52; testimony, 18, 27–30; theory, 9; and tragic events, 202; and truth, 68; and trauma, 89–91; view of, 91; visibility of, 27, 31n50, 69, 103; victims, 208, 210. See also Derrida; ghosts; González Iñárritu, Biutiful; haunting; Marías Specters of Marx. See Derrida Stam, Ella, 139 Strait of Gibraltar, 137, 141, 144 studies: cultural, 112; death and memory, 14, 18; Holocaust, 8; image, 139; literary, 10n4, 138; Mexican, xiii;

Index socioeconomic, 188; trauma, 74, 190; Transhispanic, 3, 64; US / Latina/o, 58, 76. See also memory; trauma Suárez, Juana, 120 subversive, 5, 23, 64, 69, 77, 94 surreal (-ism; -ist), 93, 156 Tagg, John, 156 El Tajín (archaeological site), 154 Takebitnanaa. See Muñoz Lorente Taylor, Diana, 79, 122 Téllez Rubio, Juan José, 141 testimony, 18, 26, 152; See also specter, testimony A Thousand Plateaus. See Deleuze time, 85–98; back in, 37, 89; chronology, 36, 86, 92, 95; cyclical view of, 37; fluidity of, 68; frozen in, 25, 107; genres, 92; ghosts and specters, 94–98; linear, 75, 103; modern, 4, 14, 44, 161; notion of, 68, 92, 94, 97; out of joint, 13, 91, 202, 203; parallelism, 45n25; past, present, future, 68, 78, 79; sense of, 37, 155, 170; and space, 38, 41, 43, 86, 102, 103, 191, 202; travel, 171, 173 Todas las almas. See Marías Todorov, Tzvetan, 96 Toro, Guillermo del, 111; El espinazo del diablo, 8, 65, 85, 101–106, 111–112, 113, 115n38 Torok, Maria, 108, 112, 114n24, 115n38 torture, 14, 18, 19, 45n35, 64, 68–69, 71, 77, 85, 88, 88–89, 89, 91, 92, 118 Transhispanic studies. See studies transition (political), 18, 28, 152; Spanish, 34, 35, 101, 202–203 Trauma (-tic, -tized, -tization), 2, 3, 8, 9, 14, 18, 34, 38, 43, 50–51, 53, 63–65, 67, 70–71, 72, 74, 75–76, 81, 85–86, 87, 88, 89–90, 91, 92–93, 94, 96, 102, 108, 115n38, 138, 148n4, 160, 161, 171, 175, 180, 182, 187; foundational, 64 Tu rostro mañana. See Marías

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“El Turco” (Julián Simón), 68 uncanny (Unheimlich), 36, 55, 63, 71, 93, 105, 134, 171, 173 The Uncanny. See Freud United Fruit Company, 51 United States. See Americas Uruguay. See Americas Unruh, Vicky, 157–158 Úslar Pietri, Arturo, 170 vampire, 10n10, 192–193 Van der Hart, Onno, 71 Van der Kolk, Bessel A., 71 Vanish (-ed, -ing), 67, 77, 78–79, 80, 117, 121–122, 124, 125, 126, 146, 151 Vega, William, 65, 117, 121–122, 127, 128; La sirga (film), 117, 121–123, 124–127 Venezuela. See Americas Venkatesh, Vinodh, 188–189 Vestigios. See Memoria Abierta Vidas escritas. See Marías “La Vida y la muerte de Marcelino Iturriaga.”. See Marías Videla, Jorge Rafael, 68–70, 80, 97 Vinyes, Ricard, 110 When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep. See Sellers-García women, 17, 65, 144, 145, 153, 154, 157, 172, 174, 177; death of, 36, 56, 153; disappeared, 74; as ghosts, 65, 159; immigrants, 137–147, 148n2; indigenous, 47, 53; as objects, 142, 156–158, 163n43; survivors of violence, 53; as symbols, 142 Wright, Sarah, 115n38 zombie, 10n10, 193, 194–195, 197–198, 199n41

About the Contributors

María del Carmen Caña Jiménez is assistant professor of Spanish in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech University. Her research deals with contemporary Colombian, Central American, and Peninsular Spanish narratives and popular cultures. Her interests revolve around topics related to violence, aesthetics, trauma, memory, childhood, and citizenship. Her current research examines the relationship between (textual and aesthetic) violence, neoliberalism, and transnationalism. She has published multiple articles in journals such as Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Latin American Literary Review, and Symposium. Edward M. Chauca is assistant professor at the College of Charleston and holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is finishing a book-length manuscript on the representations of mental illness in Peruvian literature. His research interests include the connections between capitalism and culture, politics of memory, and theory. He has articles forthcoming in The Latin American Research Review and Alter/nativas. He is also the managing editor of Spanish-American literature and culture for Hispanic Studies Review. Megan Corbin is assistant professor in the Department of Languages and Cultures at West Chester University (WCU). She joined WCU after receiving her doctorate from the University of Minnesota. Her primary areas of research center on the post-dictatorship periods of Southern Cone Latin America, and examine the ways in which individuals, groups, and society are working to fill gaps in historical memory through literary and artistic practices.

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About the Contributors

Isabel Cuñado received her PhD in Romance studies from Cornell University and is associate professor of Spanish at Bucknell University. Her areas of specialization are contemporary Spanish narrative, women writers, and memory studies. She has published extensively on the work of Javier Marías, and is the author of the book El espectro de la herencia: La narrativa de Javier Marías (2004). In 2007, she co-edited with Francisco Fernández de Alba the monographic issue Violencias en la España post-franquista: Antecedentes, representaciones e influencias in the online journal Dissidences. Her essays on historical memory in post-war Spain’s literature and culture have been published in Letras Femeninas, Hispanófila, and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among others. She is currently working on the narrative works of Álvaro Pombo and Clara Sánchez. Victoria L. Garrett holds a PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, in Hispanic languages and literatures and she teaches in the Department of Hispanic Studies at College of Charleston. Her current book project examines the performance of everyday life in Argentine popular theater from the early twentieth century. Her articles on contemporary Latin American cinema have appeared in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and the forthcoming volume Libre acceso: Critical Disability Studies in Latin American Literature and Film, and she has published on early twentiethcentury Argentine literature and popular theater in Hispania and Romance Quarterly, respectively. She is co-author of The Improbable Conquest: Letters from the Río de la Plata, 1537–1556. Juan Pablo Lupi is associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California Santa Barbara. His research interests focus on the connections between literature, philosophy, and science, and theories of poetry and poetics in Caribbean literature and culture of the twentieth century. He is the author of Reading Anew: José Lezama Lima’s Rhetorical Investigations (2012). Karen Wooley Martin is professor of Spanish at Union University and holds a doctorate of modern languages from Middlebury College. Her book, Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits Trilogy: Narrative Geographies (2010), was nominated for the Modern Languages Association Prize for the First Book and the Southern Atlantic Modern Languages Association Studies Book Award. She was awarded the Premio Victoria Urbano de Crítica from the Asociación Internacional de Literatura y Cultura Femenina Hispánica. She has published on contemporary Spanish-American and Latina narrative in South Atlantic Review, Letras Femeninas, Hispania, Orientalismos, and

About the Contributors

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Latin American Women Writers: An Encyclopedia. She is currently working on her second book on trauma in transnational Latina/o narrative. Juliana Martínez received a PhD in Romance languages and literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She is assistant professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University in Washington, DC, where she is also a researcher and associated faculty of the Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies. Professor Martínez specializes in the representation of violence in Latin America in both film and literature, focusing primarily on Colombia. She writes about the intersection of violence and body politics in the Latino and Latin-American context, and teaches courses on gender and sexuality that focus on Latin America or the US Latino community. Born out of her dissertation, her current book project is tentatively titled Mirar (lo) violento: Rebelión y exorcismo en la obra de Evelio Rosero. Susana S. Martínez is associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages at DePaul University in Chicago. She has published articles on the Paraguayan author Augusto Roa Bastos, the ethnographic memoir by Cuban American writer Ruth Behar, as well as travel narratives, reality television, and crime novels based in Guatemala. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Studies in Latin American Popular Culture, Journal of Interdisciplinary Feminist Thought, and Diálogo. Martínez is currently writing about the representation of Latin American political violence in young adult literature. N. Michelle Murray is assistant professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD from SUNY Stony Brook. Her research interests are rooted in contemporary Spanish literature and film and informed by intersectional fields of literary theory, gender studies, and cultural studies. She has published essays in Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, Letras Femeninas, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, and the Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies. Amanda L. Petersen is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures; affiliated faculty for the Latin American studies and gender studies programs at the University of San Diego; and a member of the UC-Mexicanistas Intercampus Research Group. She received her doctorate in Hispanic Studies from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research centers on representations of gender and violence in Hispanic literary traditions and has appeared in journals such as Chasqui, Letras femeninas, Literatura Mexicana, and Romance Notes. She is currently

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About the Contributors

working on a project that uses the figures of ghosts and ruins as a conceptual framework to examine contemporary Mexican narrative by women authors. Alberto Ribas-Casasayas is assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies at Santa Clara University. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He has published articles on Mexican and Central American literature and film in the peer-reviewed journals AfroHispanic Review, Hispanic Research Journal, Romance Notes, Mexican Studies, Chasqui, and the Revista de Estudíos Hispánicos. He is currently working on studies on spectrality in contemporary Latin American narrative and on debt in literature and film. Marta Sierra is professor of Latin American literature at Kenyon College. She has published extensively on Latin American urban representations, the connections of media and literature, the scope and gender tensions of the Argentinean avant-gardes, poetry and film of 1990s Argentina, and feminist conceptualizations of space in the literatures and cultures of Argentina and Chile. She coedited the special issue Global and Local Geographies: The (Dis)locations of Contemporary Feminisms in Letras Femeninas (2007) and Transnational Borderlands in Women’s Global Networks: The Making of Cultural Resistance (2011). Her latest book, Gendered Spaces in Argentine Women’s Literature (2012), addresses representations of space in fiction, drama, and poetry by Argentinean women authors. Charles St-Georges is assistant professor of Spanish at Denison University. He holds a PhD in Spanish from Arizona State University and is production editor for Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana. His research focuses on transatlantic cinema, horror films, the cinematic/literary trope of the ghost, and queer theory. His publications include an article on gendered space in Mexican horror in Polifonía (2012), an analysis of ghostly dimensions in the work of Argentine novelist Manuel Mújica Láinez in Confluencia (2014), and pending projects on Brazilian horror godfather Zé do Caixão and the use of zombies as vehicles for temporal critique in the Argentine film Sudor frío (2010). Sarah Thomas received her PhD from New York University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese and is currently assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Brown University. Her research focuses primarily on the cultural production of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spain, especially film, and explores questions of the post-dictatorship, subjectivity, affect, and the senses, particularly relating to the figure of the child. She is currently preparing a monograph on the child as filmic subject in Spanish cinema of the

About the Contributors

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period 1970–1990, and has also published on the representation of childhood in contemporary Latin American cinema.