Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction: Palabra de Mujer (Iberian and Latin American Studies) 1786838036, 9781786838032

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GUSTAVO CARVAJAL is Lecturer in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile.

Cover image: Monument to the victims of the Pinochet dictatorship at Cementerio General, Santiago. Cattallina/Shutterstock.com.

www.uwp.co.uk ISBN 978-1-78683-803-2

GWASG PRIFYSGOL CYMRU UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

9 781786 838032

Gustavo Carvajal

In what ways do the politics of memory perpetuate gendered images of those directly affected by political violence in Chile? Can the literary rewriting of painful experiences contest existing interpretations of national trauma and the portrayal of women in such discourses? How do women participate in the production of collective narratives of the past in the aftermath of violence? This book discusses the literary representation of women and their memory practices in the recent work of seven contemporary Chilean authors: Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Pía González, Fátima Sime, Arturo Fontaine, Pía Barros and Nona Fernández. It locates their works in the context of a patriarchal politics of memory and commemorative culture in Chile, and as part of a wider body of contested interpretations of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90). By an analysis of novels that depict the dictatorial past through the memories of women, it is argued that these texts understand and explore remembrance as a process by which the patriarchal co-option of women’s memories can be exposed and even contested in the aftermath of violence.

Palabra de Mujer

‘A powerful exploration of the gendered dimensions of subjugation and the many ways such violence has been rendered visible through literature. By bringing together post-dictatorial Chilean fiction, feminist theory and historical analysis, Carvajal prompts us to think in new ways about patriarchal control, militaristic culture, and how writing can become a tool of dissent.’ Dr Lisa Renee DiGiovanni, Keene State College, New Hampshire

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction

‘Drawing on an impressive selection of texts that offer insight into the gendered nature of memory politics in post-dictatorship Chile, Palabra de Mujer explores and challenges the boundaries between dictatorship and post-dictatorship, fact and fiction, perpetrator and victim, offering a nuanced portrayal of the ways in which literary voices engage with the past.’ Dr Cara Levey, University College Cork, Ireland

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction Palabra de Mujer

Gustavo Carvajal

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction

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Series Editors Professor David George (Swansea University) Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds) Editorial Board Samuel Amago (University of Virginia) Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México) Paul Castro (University of Glasgow) Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds) Catherine Davies (University of London) Luisa-­Elena Delgado (University of Illinois) Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London) Will Fowler (University of St Andrews) David Gies (University of Virginia) Gareth Walters (Swansea University) Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds) Other titles in the series Doña Bárbara Unleashed: From Venezuelan Plains to International ­Screen Jenni M. L ­ ehtinen Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary S ­ pain Sharon Keefe ­Ugalde Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and C ­ ulture Lloyd Hughes D ­ avies Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America: A Critical ­A nthology Patricia Gracía and Teresa López-­Pellisa Carmen Martín Gaite: Poetics, Visual Elements and S ­ pace Ester Bautista ­Botello The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia: Revolution in the Sugar Cane F ­ ields Robert ­Mason Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global ­Cinema Maite Conde and Stephanie ­Dennison

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction Palabra de Mujer

GUSTAVO CARVAJAL

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2021

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© Gustavo Carvajal, 2 ­ 021 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University of Wales Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 ­3NS. www.uwp.co.uk British Library CIP A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-78683-803-2 e-ISBN 978-1-78683-804-9 The right of Gustavo Carvajal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1 ­ 988.

Typeset by Mark Heslington Ltd, Scarborough, North Yorkshire Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham, United Kingdom

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Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

vii

Acknowledgementsxi Introduction1 Patriarchy and ­memory 4 Remembering dictatorial C ­ hile 8 Women’s memories in the public ­sphere 10 Chilean fictions of the traumatic ­past 14   1

Violence and Women’s Memories in El ­Desierto21 Rituals of violence and m ­ emory 25 Understanding the traumatic p ­ ast 36 Victims and p ­ erpetrators 46

  2 Militants, Wives and Mothers in Jamás el Fuego Nunca and Libreta de F­ amilia56 The Chilean novel, the dictatorship and the ­left 58 The gendered construction of militants and w ­ ives 61 The gendered construction of a ­mother 76   3

Female Collaboration in Carne de Perra and La Vida ­Doble88 The Bachelet ­government 94 Confessions and ­conversions 98 Collaborators in ­democracy 108 Telling ­stories 113

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  4 Daughters Rewriting Legacies in ‘El lugar del otro’ and ­Fuenzalida123 Inherited ­memories 128 Family ­albums 134

Daughters of the d ­ ictatorship Rewriting ­legacies

139 148

Conclusion156 Notes162 Bibliography187 Index199

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Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa. In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

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For Alejandra and Rafael, with much l­ ove

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Acknowledgements

This book started out as a doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Professor Karl Posso and Dr James Scorer at the University of Manchester. I am extremely grateful to Professor Posso and Dr Scorer for their infinite patience, valuable insight and honest advice throughout those years. What I learned under their guidance has been invaluable to me. I also thank the team at the University of Wales Press, especially Sarah Lewis, for their input and opportune help during the writing of this b ­ ook. As a graduate student, I had the privilege of pursuing my studies with many encouraging fellow postgraduates, in particular Patrick O’Shea, Alejandra Isaza, Kristina Pla and Miquel Pomar. I am especially thankful to Ignacio Aguiló for his friendship and always appreciated ­advice. While living in West Yorkshire, I found an incredible group of friends in the School of English and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds. I wish to thank Valentina Ragni, Angelica Pesarini, Silvia Bergamini, Vasiliki Nassiopoulou, Hui Ling Michelle Chiang, Adrian Knapp and Henghameh Saroukhani for their inspiration. I am particularly thankful to Arthur Rose for his friendship and support during my last months in Leeds and Manchester back in 2015. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to Nick Hutcheon. His help was invaluable during the preparation of this book. In Hull, I am eternally indebted to Ruth, Mark and Haroldo for their cheerful advice and kindness all those years away from h ­ ome. Of course, I would have achieved nothing without the love and support of my parents, María Angélica and Patricio. I am also especially indebted to my ­parents-­in-­law, Sofía and Eduardo, for their words of advice and help during the current Coronavirus disease ­pandemic.

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Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support I have received from Alejandra and Rafael. Their love helped me to write this book. My research would not have been possible without ­them.

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Introduction

This book investigates the literary representation of women and their memory practices in the work of seven contemporary Chilean authors: Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Pía González, Fátima Sime, Arturo Fontaine, Pía Barros and Nona Fernández. It locates their works in the context of a patriarchal politics of memory and commemorative culture and as part of a wider body of contested interpretations of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90). Through the analysis of novels that depict the past of women touched by political violence, it is argued that these texts understand remembrance as a process by which the (patriarchal) silencing, ­co-­option or nationalisation of women’s memories can be exposed, denounced and even contested in the aftermath of violence. It challenges masculine control over memory politics in Chile to address the painful experiences of women and to examine how these experiences are portrayed in dominant interpretations of national trauma. To show this, I discuss how the texts use formal and thematic aspects to critique the deployment of standard socio-­ ­ cultural conventions regarding women, as articulated in collective discourses of the ­past. An example of the patriarchal control over memory politics is the report of the Chilean Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (National Truth and Reconciliation Commission). In 1990, Christian Democrat president Patricio Aylwin appointed lawyer Raúl Rettig Chairman of the committee.1 A year later, the Rettig Report was published. It provided a comprehensive account of human rights violations during Pinochet’s regime, identified thousands of victims and proposed reparatory measures for the future. Yet the majority of cases presented by the report referred to male victims of forced disappearance. For the commission, the

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main targets of human rights violations were typically men, a distortion that shaped the entire historiography of the period. In fact, women were portrayed almost exclusively as mothers or wives of the disappeared and as ‘spoils of war’, their names left out of the ­three-­volume report. In the brief mention of women in the report, there is no further discussion of ­female-­specific experiences (for instance, pregnancy, abortion or motherhood in captivity). These issues remained at the margins of m ­ ale-­oriented narratives of past atrocities. It is within this context the selected novels are read in this study. When the representation of women’s memories in the public sphere is analysed, it exposes the problems inherent in writing and propagating ­male-­dominated accounts of national trauma. Certainly, women’s memories are included, but these inclusions generally serve, as in the Rettig Report, a patriarchal collective. However, by addressing the way in which women’s memories contribute to nationalised accounts of the past and revealing the extent to which their recollections differ from m ­ ale-­dominated memory discourses of dictatorial rule, these texts contest the politics of memory and the function of women’s memories in such ­discourses. When addressing the politics of memory in Chile since the return to democracy in 1990, scholars have mainly focused on two areas of inquiry. First, they have considered the body of practices and policies designed to assess the legacy of past atrocities such as prosecutions, t­ ruth-­seeking commissions, memorials and reparations. Second, a large amount of scholarly literature has been produced on transitional justice, tracing p ­ ost-­authoritarian interactions between the judiciary, the military and human rights organisations.2 The analysis of these two areas during the first decade of democracy highlights the development of Chile’s negotiated transition to a new regime of power and the struggles regarding public discussions about the past.3 Scholars such as Alexander Wilde have also pointed out that a new ‘season of memory’ emerged in Chile from the late 1990s onwards.4 A crucial year in this new phase is 1998. It marked the resignation of General Augusto Pinochet as C ­ ommander-­in-­Chief of the Armed Forces and the implementation of drastic modifications to the Chilean Constitution. But more importantly, it was also the year of Pinochet’s detention in London until his release by the British government in March 2001. All these events created the conditions

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for active discussions of the past in the public sphere. As Hite and other scholars remind us, since 2000 ‘Chile has witnessed an explosion of commemoration and m ­ emorial-­making of various kinds. The predominant form is civil ­society-­driven activity, involving often prolonged and fitful struggles among and between relatively small numbers of actors at both local and national levels’.5 Hite’s observation is important, since it is helpful to avoid a rigid definition of the politics of memory only as the result of political engineering designed by the elites in power (a t­ op-­down perspective).6 By turning to Chilean fiction published since 2005 onwards, this book challenges the assumption that the traumatic past can only be assessed and understood through the politics of memories articulated by a diversity of official and civil actors, political coalitions, grassroots movements and, in particular, testimonial and ­non-­fictional writing published since the return to ­democracy. There are also other reasons why it is important to focus on these particular works. From the 1990s onwards, Chile experienced a surge in testimonial, investigative and autobiographical writings, especially from the perspective of women. Crucial in this trajectory is the year 1993, with the publication of two testimonies by former collaborators with the military regime: Marcia Merino’s Mi Verdad and Luz Arce’s El Infierno. A year later, Carmen Castillo’s documentary film La Flaca Alejandra: Vidas y Muertes de una Mujer en Chile (1994) was released in France and Chile. It consisted of a ­five-­day interview between Castillo and Marcia Merino about her story of betrayal and collaboration. Moreover, in the early 2000s Editorial Don Bosco published the series Testimonios, focusing on the ­life-­stories of female public figures of the military regime, opposition and the transitional governments: Pinochet’s former Minister of Justice Mónica Madariaga (La Verdad y la Honestidad se Pagan Caro, 2002), former S ­ ecretary-­G eneral and President of the Chilean Communist Party Gladys Marín (La Vida es Hoy, 2002) and former President of Chile’s Consejo de Defensa del Estado (State Defence Council) Clara Szczaranski (El Bisel del Espejo: Mi Ventana, 2002). In 2007, Carmen Castillo’s new film Calle Santa Fe explored the haunting recollections of her participation in Chile’s failed socialist revolution and her traumatic memories of political persecution. More recently, in 2012, the testimony of Nubia Becker Una Mujer en Villa Grimaldi (originally published in Uruguay in 1976 under the ­pen-­name Carmen Rojas and entitled Recuerdos de una Mirista) has

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r­ e-­addressed traumatic memories from the perspective of a victim of human rights violations. The actors involved and the issues touched on in these n ­ on-­fictional works are also evident in the novels of each writer that are discussed in the following ­chapters. This book finally investigates how these writers explore the forms and contents of fictional writing, while connecting their readers to moments and issues of historical importance. For example, Carlos Franz’s El Desierto (2005) uses a victim of human rights violations to focalise the consequences of dictatorial rule, the transition to democracy and a consensual approach to the past. Diamela Eltit’s (Jamás el Fuego Nunca, 2007) and Pía González’s (Libreta de Familia, 2008) novels explore the politics of memory of the Chilean left from the perspectives of, respectively, a former guerrilla combatant and a social activist in the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements. Fátima Sime’s Carne de Perra (2009) and Arturo Fontaine’s La Vida Doble (2010) engage with the particular positions of two female collaborators living in democratic Chile (Carne de Perra) and in exile (La Vida Doble). Pía Barros’s short story ‘El lugar del otro’ (2010) and Nona Fernández’s Fuenzalida (2012) explore the burden of the inherited past on those untouched by dictatorial violence and their critical responses to the intergenerational transference of traumatic memory narratives. Moreover, despite the fact that each novelist remained in Chile during dictatorial rule, these writers find a position freed from the burden of victimhood from which to interrogate the production of patriarchal memory narratives, which they receive together with the rest of Chilean s­ ociety.

Patriarchy and m ­ emory This study follows Sylvia Walby’s definition of the term patriarchy.7 Walby discriminates between the theory and practice of patriarchy. At a theoretical level, Walby defines patriarchy as a system of social relations in which men oppress women. The key words of this definition are ‘social relations’, since it shows the concept’s rejection of the idea that patriarchy is mainly based on biological determinism or the assumption that every man is in a dominant position and every woman subordinate in any and all contexts.8 Patriarchy, as can be inferred from Walby’s definition, is a system of social relations that endures across time and place, due to its ability to adapt

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to new circumstances. Transformations in the system of social relations inevitably affect the gender imbalances that patriarchy perpetuates. In other words, when using the term ‘patriarchy’, it is important to understand the changing articulations of the concept throughout time and in different contexts. Patriarchy is not monolithic and, therefore, there is not only one form of patriarchy, just as there is never simply one way of being a p ­ erson. Walby also investigates the praxis of patriarchy and identifies six structures of social relations that produce it in different contexts: paid employment, household production, culture, sexuality, violence and state. As the work of Julieta Kirkwood in Chile exposed, all of these structures were in practice before, during and after the military regime.9 Certainly, there has been a material lessening in the intensity of these structures since the return to democracy, such as reductions in the wages gap, reproductive rights or gender quotas in the public sector. But patriarchy continues to operate in different forms. This book argues that the discussion about the past in Chile is an example of how patriarchy responds to its decrease in certain social structures: it adopts other forms to continue subordinating women in the public sphere. Indeed, as Walby demonstrates, the discussion of women’s exclusion and subordination in the private and public spheres is crucial to understanding the existence of patriarchal structures in operation in democratic societies, despite economic, cultural or political advances. Reductions in patriarchal intensity have occurred primarily in the private sphere. The work of s­ econd-­wave feminism has challenged and even reduced the exclusion of women as the main strategy of patriarchal relations in the household from a historical point of view. However, when exploring the operations of patriarchy in the public sphere, it is possible to detect how the exclusion of women has shifted into their subordination within this locus. In other words, advances and historical changes in the intensity of patriarchy at a private level precipitate its reformulation in the public sphere, rather than its abolition. Certainly, this describes the case of women’s movements in Chile before, during and after the dictatorship: from certain advances during Salvador Allende’s administration regarding the situation of Chilean women,10 to the intensification of patriarchy (and gender inequality) during Pinochet’s regime,11 to the m ­ ale-­ controlled consensual approach to issues of gender of the transitional

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governments.12 Patriarchy, then, is a changing arrangement of relations that oppresses women with different intensities at a private and public level. This study considers collective m ­ ale-­controlled memory cultures of different groups as examples of Walby’s social structures operating in the public sphere in a Chilean context. Throughout this book, it will be argued that these memory cultures produced gendered narratives of the traumatic past that were inherently oppressive for women. The social dimension of memory explored by Maurice Halbwachs is therefore crucial for supporting this claim about collective memory cultures and p ­ atriarchy. Halbwachs’s work explores memory discourses in relation to social dynamics. He departs from previous positions emanating from neurological and psychological perspectives that attempted to define how and why individuals remember. He suggests memory is not only an individual phenomenon, but a social one. As he states in The Collective Memory, individuals cannot remember in complete autonomy from the world: ‘We are never alone. Other men need not be physically present, since we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons’.13 For Halbwachs, previous studies did not pay enough attention to the fact that individuals are inevitably enclosed in one or more social groups. Acknowledging this, Halbwachs argues, changes our understanding of memory and its outcomes. This is due to the fact that the group provides individuals with ‘frameworks’ that shape the way they remember. In On Collective Memory he states: ‘No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections’.14 Halbwachs focuses on some of them: family, religion and social class.15 This book considers patriarchy, in the sense previously defined, to be equivalent to one of Halbwachs’s ‘frameworks’, since it operates in any given society. For Halbwachs, there is diversity in the degree to which people remember communally, but it is still a phenomenon rooted in social relations. As he ­states: While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. While these remembrances are mutually supportive of each other and common to all, individual members still vary in the intensity with which they experience them. I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint changes as my position changes, that

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this position itself changes as my relationships to other milieus change. Therefore, it is not surprising that everyone does not draw on the same part of this common instrument. In accounting for that diversity, however, it is always necessary to revert to a combination of influences that are social in ­nature.16

Certainly, individuals understand, experience and reconstruct these collective memories with different intensities in the present. However, these memories are powerful enough, which in Halbwachs’s approach means they are sufficiently general and impersonal, to perpetuate their meaning beyond the constant transformation of the group, the disappearance or replacement of its members and changes in political or social contexts. This explains the persistence of memories of experiences whose interest concerns a great number of members of the community, for instance, the military coup and dictatorship in Chile. Group memories of these events survive and are socially reconstructed in the present, despite the fact that the people involved in the political upheaval before, during and after the military regime have started to pass away. This is important for the examination of the selected Chilean novels, since they touch on three collective interpretations of the past: the coup as the ‘salvation’ of the country; guerrilla struggle as a ‘heroic’ sacrifice; and the reconciliation of the ‘national family’ in democratic Chile. From this, it will be argued that existing collective memories of the traumatic past represent diverse groups and contexts, yet these groups produce their interpretations of the past within patriarchal frameworks that shape female identities in the p ­ resent. Therefore, memory must be understood as a human construction (individual and collective), a result of a series of practices, tropes and conventions operating in the present that produces a narrative of the past for its promotion and dissemination. In other words, this book understands memory as the process of creating a discourse of the past that is always strategic, due to social structures of control and organisation, in terms of what is remembered, included or told and what is forgotten, omitted or silenced. Certainly, memory is an individual, social and cultural phenomenon that facilitates our understanding and experience of the past in the present. Yet, the emphasis of this study is on the influence and consequences of patriarchal social structures operating at the level of memory culture, shaping the production of group

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memories in contemporary Chile and their representation of women’s experiences and identities in them. This perspective allows one to assess and to r­ e-­read the fictionalisations of the traumatic past in the selected novels as writing against the gendered representation of women in existing interpretations of national trauma. They do so by imagining less standardised images and accounts of women directly touched by violence. Indeed, these are fictions that articulate the symbolic characterisations of feminine individuals in an attempt to contest the structures of social domination that have shaped collective explanations of the past and the role of women in ­them.

Remembering dictatorial ­Chile When discussing memory in Chile, there are four distinct interpretations regarding dictatorial rule: the coup as the salvation of the country; the dictatorship as the brutal rupture with Chile’s republican tradition; military rule as a time of political persecution and awakening; and the recent past as a ‘closed box’, that is, the silence about past atrocities for the protection of Chile’s recovered, yet fragile democracy.17 The first two of these interpretations immediately emerged as a result of General Pinochet’s coup d’état on 11 September 1973. In the first interpretation, the military overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected government is remembered as a rescue mission. Heroism is its defining quality, since the actions led by the Armed Forces saved the nation from disaster and set Chile on the right path again. The shift from ruin to salvation that the coup precipitated was consolidated by a heroic interpretation of the traumatic past put forward by the military junta and promoted throughout the dictatorship and into the transition to democracy.18 From this ideological perspective, Allende’s term came to represent a total disaster for political life in Chile: a period characterised by radical redistributions of property and power, economic struggles and reorganisations that produced virulent quarrels, rampant inflation, production bottlenecks, an increment of political violence and street confrontations.19 As a consequence, the heroic interpretation proposes national sentiment put pressure on the military to rise up, turning the coup into a pronunciamiento (‘revolt’) on behalf of Chilean

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society. For this reason, the issue of human rights violations during Pinochet’s rule is remembered in this narrative, like some of the characters do in Franz’s El Desierto, Sime’s Carne de Perra or Fontaine’s La Vida Doble, as the social cost of setting the country right and repairing the consequences of Allende’s disastrous ­presidency. With the coup and dictatorial rule, a dissident reading of the past also emerged: a discourse that opposed the interpretation of the bombing of La Moneda, the presidential palace, as a ‘rescue mission’. In this interpretation, the coup emerges as a brutal rupture with Chile’s republican tradition. This narrative appears, in particular, among victims, survivors and relatives of the disappeared, most of them committed supporters of Allende’s administration and deeply involved in the radical process of social revolution initiated during his presidency. For this narrative, the painful past becomes an open wound that fails to heal, as in the case of Laura in Franz’s El Desierto, the unknown former guerrilla combatant in Diamela Eltit’s Jamás el Fuego Nunca or María Rosa in Sime’s Carne de Perra, precisely because of the paradoxical ongoing need to honour the memory of those never found, or the haunting consequences of the rampant violence of the regime. Born from the cruelty unleashed against any possible dissidence, this narrative is advanced by civil organisations such as Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo (Sebastián Acevedo Movement against Torture)20 and the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Association of Family Members of the Disappeared, AFDD).­21 But in this dissident memory, the past is also remembered and explained as a time of persecution and awakening. In this respect, its social and political base not only considers those directly affected by the loss of a relative or loved one. It also incorporates a larger and more diverse community. The traumatic past is also remembered as a period characterised by the violent persecution of dissidents, the collapse of democratic rights and the staying power of the dictatorship.22 Significantly, this produced diverse forms of ­self-­discovery and activism among Chileans. Past ideological persecution is remembered as a time of intense, overwhelming and exhausting social and political work, which developed around the ecumenical Comité ­Pro-­Paz ­(Pro-­Peace Committee, an institution born as a result of the initiative of religious leaders of different

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faiths),23 and the Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Solidarity, founded by Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez).­24 By the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, and since the beginning of the country’s transition to democracy between 1988 and 1990, a new interpretation of the recent past slowly but steadily started to emerge, one that still prevails in Chilean society today. The past in this interpretation, in particular regarding human rights violations, proved to be too explosive. The public airing of painful events of the recent past was considered ­counter-­productive in the context of a recently recovered democratic regime. In order to progress and look towards a bright future, this narrative understood memory as the monumentalisation of the past based on the selective forgetting of inconvenient aspects of dictatorial rule. Logically, but not exclusively, these practices of memory found fertile ground among the C ­ entre-­R ight, the Armed Forces and former supporters of Pinochet’s regime. Nevertheless, the ruling ­Centre-­Left Concertación coalition also realised that the politics of memory in the country was a divisive and difficult matter and opted to shift the discussion of Chile’s political and cultural future towards less contentious topics. As Alfredo J­ocelyn-­Holt rightly claimed after a decade of democracy, ‘en Chile impera cada vez más un deseo de escaparse del pasado. El pasado nos produce vergüenza y hasta espanto’25 (‘in Chile an increasing desire to escape the past reigns. The past shames us and frightens us’). The closing of the memory box showed its usefulness in ­post-­dictatorial societies in a variety of situations and political scenarios. Clearly, active forgetting became the precondition for peace and reconciliation in the most heterogeneous contexts: either between estranged relatives in the private sphere, amid divided ­citizen-­members of the national family, or among the victims of human rights violations attempting to move on from the haunting consequences of their painful ­experiences.

Women’s memories in the public s­ phere Since the early 2000s, the role of women’s memories in the national narrative of dictatorial rule has become a subject of concern and analysis in the Southern Cone. In Elizabeth Jelin’s argument, the dominant experiences publicly narrated in p ­ost-­ dictatorial

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societies have been mainly ­male-­focused. Questioning this framework of interpretation has become a priority in new democratic regimes. Female voices might play an instrumental role, Jelin proposes, in questioning the dominant voices that shape national narratives in the public sphere. According to Jelin, the study of national memory from the gendered point of view of women is useful since ‘Las voces de las mujeres cuentan historias diferentes a las de los hombres, y de esta manera se introduce una pluralidad de puntos de vista’26 (‘Women’s voices tell different stories than men’s, thus introducing into the public space of debate a plurality of viewpoints and worldviews’)27 about the contentious past. More recently, María Di Liscia has argued, in the light of Jelin’s ideas, that the recovery of women’s memories of the traumatic past is part of a political struggle that not only questions dominant memory discourses, but also empowers women: ‘rescatar la memoria es incorporar a quienes no fueron reconocidas (ni siquiera por ellas mismas), pero también … es una tarea de reconquista’28 (‘to recover memory is to incorporate those women who were not recognised (not even by themselves), but also … it is a way of retaking the past’). Even in the most recent studies of the politics of memory in Chile, the role of women in the design and implementation of such policies is often unacknowledged.29 In the latest volume edited by Cath Collins, Katherine Hite and Alfredo Joignant on the topic, diverse essays ­re-­evaluate a wide range of practices designed to assess the legacy of past atrocities and yet none of them pay attention to gender. That is surprising even if we only take into consideration one recent event that involves a woman mentioned in the title of the volume: President Michelle Bachelet. General Pinochet’s demise during her first presidential term (2006–10) disrupted consolidated discourses about the legacies of his regime and Chile’s successful democratic present. In the volume, Alfredo Joignant discusses the significance of Pinochet’s funeral in the framework of the politics of memory in Chile, but he does not pay attention to Bachelet’s involvement in this historical event.30 This detail becomes an inexplicable omission, considering Bachelet’s personal experiences during Pinochet’s regime, and the fact that she was the head of state at that time and the one who ultimately decided the appropriate funeral rites for the former General. In addition, of all the essays in the edited volume, only one partially

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discusses the significance of Bachelet’s Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) and its influence in the politics of memory in Chile. In fact, Cath Collins’s and Katherine Hite’s joint essay studies at length a number of detention centres, commemorative places and symbols such as Villa Grimaldi, the statue of President Salvador Allende in Santiago’s Plaza de la Constitución and the Jaime Guzmán Memorial in Santiago’s financial district. This insufficient treatment is the most recent evidence that in the Chilean context little scholarly attention is paid to the significance of women’s participation in such memorial ­processes. As these works evidence, the status of women’s memories of a traumatic (personal or collective) past in the public sphere has been predominantly marginalised. Responses to this situation often move towards the idea of rescuing silenced voices either for creating a new history ‘from below’ or acknowledging the contribution of women in the reconstruction of the past. This book recognises such a situation in Chile’s p ­ ost-­dictatorial society, but also aims to expose a subtler and more complex conflict between women’s memories and the collective interpretation of the traumatic past. As a consequence, it pays attention not only to the content of women’s memories of the dictatorship in Chile, but also to how women’s memories are narrated in the public sphere and the role they play in national discourses in the aftermath of violence. Nelly Richard provides a particular view on this conflict in her analysis of the memories of three key female figures of the dictatorship, resistance and transition to democracy. In ­‘No-­revelaciones, confesiones y transacciones de género’, Richard analyses the testimonies of Mónica Madariaga, Gladys Marín and Clara Szczaranski,31 important figures during both the dictatorship and Chile’s democratic transition. Richard shows how, through their memories, these women construct their identities in accordance with collective (either official or partisan) memory discourses of the traumatic past. Madariaga, for instance, recalls her active role as member of Pinochet’s cabinet in the construction of what Steve J. Stern identifies as the ‘heroic memory’ in Chile. In order to perform her role, Richard points out, Madariaga suppressed her identity as a woman so as to reach a prominent position of power and influence within the military government. As the Minister of Justice, her ‘identificación con la Ley [fue] total y la

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rigidez de esta identificación sublimada con la Ley [pasó] por la denegación de lo femenino como seña de la diferencia sexual’32 (‘her identification with the Law [was] complete and the rigidity of this glorified identification with the Law implied the negation of femininity as a sign of sexual difference’). This m ­ ale-­oriented gender construction was crucial for Madariaga to gain political power within the regime. By doing so, she avoided contravening the hierarchy of social and sexual roles imposed by the dictatorship, who believed that the contribution of Chilean women to the salvation of the country appealed to their ‘natural calling’ as wives and ­mothers. In the case of Gladys Marín, former President and National Secretary of the Chilean Communist Party, Richard observes similar strategies of identity construction through practices of memory. Marín’s testimony reveals memory as resistance and awakening, in Stern’s terms. Richard shows how Marín’s self dissolved into the collective, embracing a common rhetoric and identity of those defeated by the regime. Richard c­ oncludes: El ocultamiento del ‘yo’ tras el ‘nosotros’ de la enunciación colectiva y la necesidad de ‘ir más allá de una misma’, para trascender lo subjetivo en la voz histórica del Pueblo o en la dogmática del Partido [Comunista], son los rasgos que entona G. Marín en su recuperación de la historia por la vía de los recuerdos biográficos.­33 The concealment of the ‘I’ behind the ‘We’ of collective enunciation and the need to ‘go beyond oneself’, in order to overcome the subjective and in the historic voice of the people or the dogma of the [Communist] Party, are the strategies G. Marín mobilises for the recovery of history by means of personal memories.

In between these two reformulated subjectivities, Richard pinpoints in the testimony of Clara Szczaranski, former President of the Chilean government legal agency Consejo de Defensa del Estado (State Defence Council), the identity of the Chilean Transition. This can be associated with a third kind of emblematic memory in Chile, what Stern calls a ‘closed box’.34 In her testimony, Szczaranski’s ‘I’ embodies the melancholia of ­ post-­ dictatorial Chile. This implies a subject in constant negotiation between a loss of a daughter and a present built upon ‘the consensual model of a “democracy of agreements” formulated by the Chilean government of the Transition’,35 of which Szczaranski is an active

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guarantor as a prominent official of the Chilean State. Szczaranski finds some solace in a model of femininity in accordance with the rhetoric of forgiveness and reconciliation of the democratic transition, put forward by the administration of Christian Democrat President Patricio Aylwin and the Chilean Catholic Church.36 Her memories of the past emerge from her ‘new’ subjectivity, exemplified in her ‘revealed’ religious spirituality and her marriage to a former Jesuit priest. For Richard, these testimonies suggest that official or partisan discourses about the traumatic past also put forward strategic ideas about identity reconstruction for w ­ omen.

Chilean fictions of the traumatic ­past In his study of literature and the authoritarian experience in Chile post-1973, Rodrigo Cánovas suggests that some of the fiction produced in this period is marked by a need to question dictatorial rule and ideology.37 These literary productions, Cánovas argues, emerge in a context where increasing importance is given to testimonies and investigative journalism. In addition, the influence of the novel is declining, there is an increased use of new media (videotape), the literary ­avant-­garde is beginning to ­re-­emerge and there is a general search for new means of artistic expression.38 His analysis foregrounds a range of approaches with the same objective in Chilean ­post-­coup literature: challenging dictatorial rule.39 He identifies some of the literary practices that facilitated such a project: the parody of any order (for example, the narrative of Enrique Lihn), a utopian construction of the future (present in the poetry of Raúl Zurita) and the recovering of the country’s republican tradition (developed by the ICTUS theatre company).40 In practice, this produced two forms of dialogue between literature and the dictatorial present. First, a body of texts was produced where the political dimension of Chile’s reality is addressed in contravention of the regime’s prohibitions. The second form of dialogue is marked by its close relationship with critical discourses regarding conventional forms of representation and language. This second form replaces the political dimension of Chile’s situation with an emphasis on a ­self-­reflexive literature.41 The common feature between these two attitudes towards writing is the fact that they explore new artistic strategies to bear witness to Chile’s

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cultural situation under military oppression.42 In fact, Cánovas’s study foregrounds the extent to which literature (with the exception of Radrigán’s plays and ICTUS’s collective creations), starts focusing on issues of literary representation and language as a site of ideological i­ nscription. In other studies, the significance of Pinochet’s coup d’état for Chilean literature is read in its transformative impact on the way fictional writing started to be understood and practised in the country. In particular, this was developed by a group of novelists and poets that became ­well-­established figures of the Chilean canon, including Diamela Eltit, Juan Luis Martínez, Raúl Zurita, Diego Maquieira, Carmen Berenguer and Soledad Fariña. For Eugenia Brito, for instance, the coup produced, in cultural terms, a ‘new scene’ or a ‘Chilean resistance’ defined by an expressive literary project that was unprecedented in the history of the country. The modulations of this project took various forms. Brito argues, for instance, that against the domesticated and uniformed ‘national’ corpse, the individual body became the signifier of transgression against the oppressive system of regulatory military institutions. In particular, the represented body became a site of struggle, resistance, protest and performance. This objective put the practice of this kind of literature in a marginal position in Chilean society. To secure the exercise of these practices, the new scene of writing located itself ‘at the margins’ of official culture and institutions. From its position, this form of literary resistance ultimately, Brito argues, is able to reconstitute the silenced Other (the fetishised Aboriginal or the indio), but also challenge the dictatorial Other (the cacique, the Conquistador, the landowner and the father).­43 More recently, Mario Lillo has discriminated between three ways of addressing the traumatic past in Chilean novels of the dictatorship: committed memory, tangential memory and the ellipses of personal and collective memories. Committed memory in some novels of the dictatorship claims the necessity of a rigorous revision of the past and explicit loyalty to the victims of the dictatorship at different levels. Tangential memory, which Lillo claims is more dominant, is concerned with addressing experiences in an oblique fashion. This happened because the necessary political conditions for addressing these issues were not well established or because some authors made use of their creative freedom in their

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selection of themes and perspectives. The ellipses of individual or collective memories are identified by Lillo in a collection of texts that seems to deliberately ignore the historical trauma in Chile. These are texts, Lillo points out, that set their plots in an untainted past despite being written and published during the harshest years of dictatorial oppression in the country (for instance, José Luis Rosasco’s novel Dónde estás Constanza, 1980). They also locate their stories during the dictatorship years but without any reference to the political context (Gonzalo Contreras’s El nadador, 1995), which depicts what Lillo describes as a parallel reality to dictatorial rule.44 Thematically, Lillo claims, narrative productions post-1990 depict characters and narrators with a diminished sense of historical consciousness. This undermines the possible r­e-­imagination of practices of memory after dictatorial rule.45 As a result, various studies have concluded that both oblivion and a sense of orphanhood are the main mechanisms developed by a considerable number of Chilean writers who attempt to deal with the traumatic past in narrative f­ orm.46 This book seeks to reintroduce the discussion of the relationship between the Chilean novel and the recent traumatic past. For this reason, it explores a set of texts that propose literature as a privileged cultural discourse for the investigation of trauma and its treatment in narrative form. In particular, this study considers and foregrounds how Chilean writers approach the past from the perspective of ­re-­imagined female figures of the dictatorship. It will be shown how these figures (female victims, militant mothers, female collaborators and daughters of victims) embody several forms of understanding the dictatorship crucial to the representation of the traumatic past in contemporary Chilean society. These forms are: (i) a time to understand traumatic experiences rather than just remember them; (ii) a chance to challenge official or partisan memory narratives; (iii) an opportunity to establish links between an inconvenient past and a neoliberal present; and (iv) an occasion to playfully r­ e-­appropriate inherited memory discourses for their critical re-­elaboration. The analysis of Carlos Franz’s novel El Desierto (2005) in Chapter 1 focuses on the memory practices of a victim of human rights violations in the light of two milestone texts in the Chilean novel of the dictatorship: Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica (1983) and Los Vigilantes (1994). It will be first examined how notions of victimhood,

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gendered violence and justice in El Desierto challenge the idea of women as the sacrificial victims of ­ state-­ led violence or their communities (ideas explored in Eltit’s Lumpérica). In this chapter, there will also be a discussion on how El Desierto replaces images of victimised women as mournful subjects by more reflective victims. They would attempt to understand violence and patriarchal oppression, rather than merely remember it in a grieving fashion (ideas explored in Eltit’s Los Vigilantes). This chapter also explores some of the problems that emerge when a male author attempts to write a story of a female victim of human rights violations. The last section focuses on content and form to show how some of the elements in El Desierto might reinforce male fantasies about the ­co-­option of women’s voices in the aftermath of c­ onflict. Chapter 2 focuses on a more recent text by Eltit, Jamás el Fuego Nunca (2007), and Pía González’s novel Libreta de Familia (2008), within the context of the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements and radical guerrilla groups in dictatorial Chile. This chapter considers the maternal positions of the two protagonists: in Eltit’s text, a nameless female urban guerrilla combatant struggling to survive with a shadowy comrade in democracy; and in González’s text, Laura Miranda, the wife of a ­Christian-­left social activist and mother of their two children. This chapter will show how the texts depart from realist aesthetics and denunciatory rhetoric (mainly cultivated by male authors politically affiliated with the Chilean left) to challenge dominant discourses of the recent traumatic past. Gendered images were articulated by groups in the opposition to Pinochet to explain the past and their political defeat in the aftermath of conflict: in Steve Stern’s terms, the past as a time of heroic ‘resistance and awakening’ against oppression and the past as a conveniently ‘closed [memory] box’.47 In this chapter, the figure of the mother is discussed in the context of human rights groups in Argentina and Chile. It will show how Eltit and González, by ­re-­imagining the memory practices of mothers critical of Pinochet’s regime, shed light on similar patriarchal structures that inform memory discourses produced by the radical Chilean left and the political coalition that led Chile’s process of ­redemocratisation. Chapter 3 examines the female collaborator in Fátima Sime’s novel Carne de Perra (2009) and Arturo Fontaine’s La Vida Doble (2010). Carne de Perra tells the story of María Rosa and her ambiguous relationship with her torturer and later lover, as she helps him

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to secure the assassination of an important leader of the opposition and, years later in democracy, euthanises him when he is a terminal cancer patient. La Vida Doble portrays a paid interview between an anonymous writer and Irene/Lorena, a regime collaborator, about her past history, which includes radical political militancy and the betrayal of her former comrades as an agent of Pinochet’s secret intelligence police. This figure is analysed within the context of her collusion with Pinochet’s repressive groups, but also, and crucially, how these practices continue into the democratic period. This suggests that the politics of memory put forward by the transitional governments can be understood as subtle forms of collaboration with the past regime. In this regard, the reading of these texts pays particular attention to President Michelle Bachelet’s first term. It will be demonstrated that both novels can be read as challenging the politics of memory as they emerged during her first presidency, coincidentally the last government of the successful Concertación coalition. It will be first discussed how Bachelet’s victory created great expectations for the politics of memory in Chile because of her personal history as a victim and relative of victims of human rights violations. It will also be shown how Bachelet embodies the interpretation of the past of the Concertación coalition by analysing two events during her administration: Pinochet’s demise in 2006 and the inauguration of the Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights) in 2010. Discussion about how María Rosa and Irene/Lorena enact practices of memory will illuminate how these confessions/conversions contest what Bachelet and her presidency represented for national discourses of reconciliation and pardon. The final section shows how the texts link the figure of the female collaborator with the consensual discourses of the Concertación coalition, suggesting that María Rosa and Irene/ Lorena continue to collaborate in the democratic period, which echoes ­state-­led decisions regarding Pinochet’s role in democratic Chile and the legacy of his ­regime. Finally, Chapter 4 explores Pía Barros’s story ‘El lugar del otro’, taken from the collection El Lugar del Otro (2010), and Nona Fernández’s novel Fuenzalida (2012). It focuses on the memory practices of a crucial figure of the memory struggle, the daughter of those directly affected by the violence of the military regime. The daughter protagonist in Barros’s story, Luciana, struggles to

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find a position within her family as she tries to deal with the nomadic life as the child of exiled parents. She develops a tense relationship with her family over the transmission of memories of Chile and their failed political project. In Nona Fernández’s Fuenzalida, the d ­ aughter-­protagonist playfully rewrites the story of her ‘disappeared’ father and the impact of this experience on her sense of family. As a successful writer for television, she rewrites her father’s story as a martial arts film. In this chapter, it is argued that both protagonists redefine the way in which the ‘daughter of the dictatorship’ engages with the memories of experiences that they did not suffer directly and with the burden such memorial transmission places on them. I explore how critical postmemorial practices used in the transmission of trauma redefine a sense of kinship and position within what Cecilia Sosa has called, in the Argentine context, the ‘wounded family’, that is, the lineage of mothers, grandmothers, children, relatives and siblings of the disappeared who have been the guardians of mourning.48 In the first two sections of this chapter, it is shown how the transmission of memories from the previous generation operates and its impact on the daughters’ sense of kinship. In these sections, it is also exposed how strategic interpretations of the traumatic past are transferred through behaviours and mnemonic objects, in particular, photographs. The third section compares the memory practices and sense of kinship expressed by two daughters of the direct protagonists in the conflict: Michelle Bachelet (a daughter of victims of human rights violations) and Evelyn Matthei (a daughter of a member of Pinochet’s military Junta) in the context of their campaigns as presidential candidates and coincidentally during commemorations for the fortieth anniversary of the coup (September 2013). This section demonstrates how both daughter-­ protagonists, in the light of Bachelet’s and Matthei’s practices of memory, start reshaping their sense of kinship to evaluate the traumatic past from critical positions that Bachelet and Matthei are unable to access publicly. The final section considers the ways in which the d ­ aughter-­protagonists critically rewrite their legacies from the previous generation. The purpose of this is to illustrate how the texts introduce questions regarding the meaning of the recent past for the second generation. It is also important to uncover how postmemorial practices inaugurate a process of desacralisation of traumatic experiences to help to displace the

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legitimacy of general interpretations of trauma in the context of the memory question. The chapter ends by arguing that diverse forms of recalling the past from the perspective of women permit us to widen our understanding of the way a p ­ ost-­dictatorial society remembers and transfers these interpretations to the new generations in Chile.

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Chapter ­1

Violence and Women’s Memories in El ­Desierto

On 26 September 2003, the Chilean Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture) was established by presidential decree. President Ricardo Lagos appointed the Catholic Bishop of Santiago, Sergio Valech, as the head of the ­ eight-­ member committee.1 The appointment was not completely accepted by some sectors of the political spectrum. It was considered to be only a reinforcement of the excessive influence of the Catholic Church on state discourses of the past – while attempting to rekindle the image of the reconciled Christian Chilean family and women as the fulcrum of such an institution. The prevailing silence about women’s experiences in the Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission report of the 1990s – that accordingly received heavy criticism from women’s group and political organisations – was rectified in the ­t wo-­volume document presented to the public in 2004. The Valech committee overtly declared the importance of responding to women’s traumatic experiences, in accordance with international agreements and United Nations resolutions on these issues.2 The report acknowledged that women were detained and tortured because of their social or political activism and not simply because of their status as mothers, wives, partners or daughters of male members of the opposition. Yet, the testimonies quoted to describe the reality of political violence turned women’s experiences into exemplary cases of victimhood. For instance, the cited excerpts typically depicted women as the victims of sexualised violence carried out by men. However, many accounts of survivors have explicitly testified to sexualised torture

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practices being administered by female agents. These agents were also involved in the murder of political prisoners.3 Furthermore, most of the testimonies mentioned focused on the issue of motherhood. The report considered it worth emphasising the symbolic nature of violent atrocities aimed at maternalism, despite the fact that they represented less than 7 per cent of the women who testified to the commission.4 In a similar fashion to the previous Rettig Report, the Valech Commission depicted the practices of the regime against women precisely as atrocities because they deviated from traditional values in a conservative society, where women are sacred and – in regular circumstances – are under the protection of the State. Consequently, testimonies where women appeared to infringe conventional norms were strategically silenced by the report.5 In this sense, through the perpetuation of images associated with a conservative understanding of women’s identities and roles in society, the Valech Report was presented to the public as a way of continuing Chile’s much needed national reconciliation in the new ­millennium. It is within this context that this chapter examines changes in the representation of gendered dictatorial violence and memories of female victims of human rights violations. It focuses on Carlos Franz’s novel El Desierto (2005) and reads this novel in the light of earlier ­well-­known literary writings about the dictatorship. El Desierto plots the story of an exiled female victim of human rights violations and her return to democratic Chile in an attempt to confront her past and trauma. It portrays the irruption of traumatic memories in the life of those directly touched by dictatorial violence. These irruptions of the past serve as stimulus for thinking about the struggles for truth and justice within the context of a still fragile democracy. Also significant in El Desierto is the representation of military rule and its impact on Chilean society from the perspective of women, whose voices are traditionally ­co-­opted or marginalised in official accounts of national conflict.6 By demonstrating how a tormented woman narrates the traumatic past through intertextuality and ­self-­reflection, El Desierto challenges two forms of female representation produced by the military regime and the transitional governments of the 1990s respectively: first, the sacrificial; and, second, the traumatised victim of dictatorial v­ iolence. El Desierto is structured around two crucial moments in the life of its main character, Laura Larco. First, the novel depicts Laura’s

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return to the fictional town of Pampa Hundida after twenty years of exile to respond to her daughter’s inquiries regarding Laura’s role during the dictatorship as the town’s judge. Before arriving in Chile, Laura writes a long letter in which she recounts this period of her life for her daughter: her time as the legal authority of the town, the appearance of new military rulers, the construction of a detention centre and the execution of political prisoners. The novel alternates between chapters that depict Laura’s return to Chile by a t­hird-­person narrator and Laura’s fi ­ rst-­hand recollections of a time of violence and death. Critics have praised this depiction of Chile’s recent tragedy. José Rodríguez Elizondo ardently claims that the novel is ‘la mejor historia privada del Chile pos golpe de 1973’, concluding that ‘nos cuenta el país de Pinochet con más cercanía, emoción y verosimilitud que el mejor libro politológico’ (‘the best private history of ­post-­coup Chile [concluding that] it portrays Pinochet’s Chile with more proximity, emotion and verisimilitude than any outstanding academic study on Chilean politics’).7 Arturo Fontaine agrees, stating that Franz ‘sin abandonar el plano realista [ha escrito] una novela en la que hay grandeza, en la que hay verdad y que está recorrida de punta a cabo por una belleza terrible’ (‘without renouncing to literary realism [has written] a novel in which there is greatness, truth and shot through with a terrible beauty’).8 The Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez is even more passionate in his celebration of the novel and declares that El Desierto is not only able to describe Chile’s trauma, but also ‘las pasiones que en él se desatan y que corresponden a cualquier época, a cualquier lugar, a la entraña misma de la condición humana’ (‘the passions unleashed which correspond, at any time and place, to the essence of the human condition’).9 However, El Desierto’s portrayal of the past from the perspective of a woman is also problematic. Critics have failed to consider the subordinate position, within the combination of narrative voices that structure the novel, Franz grants to the voice of Laura. It will be shown how Laura’s letter to her daughter Claudia is not free from the influence of patriarchal control in its narration of the past, since the reader discovers at the end of the novel how the letter had been laboriously edited by Laura’s ­ex-­husband. This element ultimately reveals the struggles of the text to move beyond a masculine narrative control of the past in contemporary Chile, despite initial successes in challenging

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official explanations of political violence and the image of women in such ­discourses. In order to show how El Desierto contests dominant representations of military rule and female victims of dictatorial violence, it will be compared to two other texts that address this period from the point of view of female characters: the novels Lumpérica (1983) and Los Vigilantes (1994) by Diamela Eltit. Like El Desierto, these texts depict diverse practices of tormenting the human body and psyche, paying particular attention to women. The texts also share a tendency to highlight the struggles of those individuals directly affected by violence during and after dictatorial rule. For example, unlike any other story officially published in Chile during the dictatorship and despite existing censorship, Eltit’s novel Lumpérica addressed tense issues such as surveillance, oppression and violence against the female body. By constructing the text around the cultural residues of the 1973 coup, the novel challenged militaristic culture through linguistic plurivalency and ambiguity.10 A metaphor for contemporary Chile and an unconventional form of political protest against the dictatorship, Eltit’s Lumpérica quickly became a watershed text in the ­post-­coup Chilean literary scene, getting much critical attention since its publication.11 The fact that Lumpérica and the rest of Eltit’s work written under dictatorship have been described by her as a form of a ‘secret political resistance’12 reveals the extent to which she contextualised her literary practices in terms of a necessary battle against military rule. In her following novels, written mostly during the dictatorship, Por la Patria (1986), El Cuarto Mundo (1988) and Vaca Sagrada (1991), Eltit continued to explore the central themes and aesthetic already outlined in Lumpérica. However, Eltit’s Los Vigilantes – her first novel written entirely during democracy – represents a shift in her style towards less experimental strategies of representation. As noted by Mary Green, Los Vigilantes is an allegory of ­post-­dictatorial Chile where a nameless paternal figure is shown to be simultaneously absent from the household and yet still ­all-­powerful, since he is harassing the mother of his disabled child.13 As with El Desierto, letters are the medium used by the mother to address the man’s inquiries, demands and attacks and to explain decisions and events from her past and life with the child. Crucially, Eltit wrote this novel not at the margins of official or cultural institutions, but from within the

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new government, as cultural attaché to the Chilean embassy in Mexico. This biographical fact perhaps explains her interest in the exploration of her position as a writer affiliated to the power of the transitional governments and their consensual style of p ­ olitics. In the following sections, there will be an examination of the ritualisation of sexualised violence in Franz’s text and Eltit’s Lumpérica. It will be argued that El Desierto departs from the sacrificial image of the female body explored in Lumpérica in order to propose a critique to the patriarchal control of the politics of memory in the p ­ ost-­dictatorship years. Next, the way in which female victims approach their traumatic experiences and their possible representation will be explored. This will show that El Desierto can be read as a departure from the image of female victims as melancholic or traumatised survivors, both images developed in Eltit’s novel Los Vigilantes. It will be demonstrated that, by means of a ­self-­reflective approach to the past and the use of intertextuality, El Desierto constructs an image of the female victim as a subject deeply involved in ‘understanding’ political violence, justice and democracy. The concluding section will discuss the problems in the novel when a male author attempts to represent female victims and perpetrators, exploring how the initial success of the text’s nuanced representation of women is undermined by the patriarchal manipulation of Laura’s voice in order to produce a narrative of the past. Finally, given this chapter’s focus on the representation of political violence carried out against women, Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985) will be useful for explaining the strategies used by both novelists when addressing torture, extreme physical pain, and power in a dictatorial c­ ontext.

Rituals of violence and m ­ emory The context from which Lumpérica emerges is central to the understanding of its articulation of the female victim during the dictatorship. Published in 1983, Lumpérica’s experimental aesthetics disturbed the established Chilean literary scene. At one level, Lumpérica departed from other literary projects more interested in realist testimonies of human rights violations. In contrast, the style of Lumpérica, as Nelly Richard notes, focused on challenging official discourses through linguistic experimentation

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and the liberating possibilities of plurisignification.14 The regime’s official discourses regarding women intensified their ‘natural’ subordination in a militaristic context.15 Through semantic ambiguity, Eltit responded with Lumpérica, her personal, yet unconventional act of political protest against dictatorial culture. Idelber Avelar observes how Eltit’s work, especially Lumpérica, was shaped by two discursive spectra: the experimental visual arts of Chilean creators Carlos Leppe, Eugenio Dittborn and Carlos Altamirano and the Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos (DEH, Department of Humanistic Studies) at the Universidad de Chile.16 In fact, Eltit collaborated with Ronald Kay, Eugenia Brito, Rodrigo Cánovas and Raúl Zurita at the DEH in the study of new literary theories and practices for the Chilean cultural context and her own dissident work. She was particularly interested in the representation of ­trans-­genre/gender operations upon the body and urban spaces, the use of a provocative rhetoric and radical narrative fragmentation.17 For Julio Ortega, this combination of theories and techniques explains the manifest absence of a plot in Lumpérica.18 Almost impossible to summarise, Lumpérica is structured around a group of scenes repetitively emerging throughout the text and set in a public square in Santiago de Chile. This urban space is highly symbolic, being the foundation site of the nation and the traditional locus of the marginalised in Latin American cities. The plaza is seized by a woman named E. Luminata and a cohort of beggars over the course of one winter night.19 The scenes between E. Luminata and the homeless men and women evoke gestures with a multiplicity of interpretations. They perform a profane ceremony, a baptism, a ­self-­immolation rite and the public eroticisation of E. Luminata’s body. It is with recourse to these ­dream-­like scenes and ­avant-­garde aesthetics that Eltit aims to subvert the representation of violence against women in a context evocative of dictatorial rule, a nation of ‘Sitios eriazos/rezagos/ víctimas/deshechos humanos/hospederías abiertas/atentados’20 (‘uncultivated sites/surplus stock/victims/human refuse­/open-­air shelters/assaults’).­21 The main strategy Eltit uses is to couple the voluntary, yet violent act of branding the female body with writing as textual inscription. In this sense, Eltit offers a possible solution to a central problem Scarry identifies about physical pain: the difficulty of expressing it. This happens because, as Scarry shows, pain occurring within the

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interior of a person’s body seems ‘remote’, ‘invisible’, almost ‘unreal’ to others. As a consequence, this feature creates a split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons. In addition, Scarry points out, the pain’s unsharability is secured through its resistance to language. Pain actively destroys it, since extreme physical agony brings about an immediate reversion to a p ­ re-­verbal state.22 It is precisely these two features that Lumpérica seems to address in order to turn extreme physical torment into a political act of resistance. In the text, the body is represented as a site of deliberate violent incisions. An example of this occurs in the opening pages. After the first encounter between E. Luminata and the beggars, the square under the light of a neon sign provides the stage for E. Luminata’s first public ritual of engraving of her ­body: Estrella su cabeza contra el árbol una y otra vez hasta que la sangre rebasa su piel, le baña la sangre su cara, se limpia con las manos, mira sus manos, las lame … Se vuelve hacia ellos y los recorre con su sello particular. Tiene la herida abierta y no se vislumbra aún la proporción del daño. Levanta sus manos y a plena conciencia lleva sus dedos a la cara para reabrirse la piel partida. Su mirada está difusa y allí en medio de la plaza, sólo para los pálidos, deja oír un aullido y su voz aguda se expande y prolonga en la o ­ scuridad.23 She smshes [sic] her head against the tree again and again until the blood overflows the skin, it bathes her face that blood, she cleans her face with her hands, looks at her hands, licks them . . . She turns toward them and looks them over with her personal stamp. Her wound is open and the degree of injury is still not apparent. She raises her hands and fully conscious guides her fingers to her face in order to further part the open skin. Her gaze is blank and there in the middle of the square, only for the pale people, she lets out a howl and her piercing voice expands and extends into the d ­ arkness.24

The brutality of the gesture is part of a baptismal ceremony. It is the start of a rite of communion between E. Luminata and the homeless, described as ‘la salvación’, ‘fiesta’, ‘desenfreno’ and ‘pri­v ilegio’25 (‘salvation’, ‘feast’, ‘wantonness’ and ‘privilege’).26 The performance of this ritual in the plaza is significant. It alludes to the violence typically carried out behind closed doors against those bodies perceived by the regime as departing from traditional gender roles (mothers, wives) and embracing political activism.27 E. Luminata willingly marks her body to produce a corporeal text,

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ready for exhibition in the traditional locus of the community. In doing so, her body becomes a reminder of the social body that the dictatorship has destroyed. She will r­e-­ inscribe it through public s­ elf-­immolation, which she does in the name of the shattered community. This gesture has led Jean Franco to conclude E. Luminata ‘is not born again as a person but as a project [after her baptism]’.28 For these reasons, E. Luminata performs many rituals of violence under the light of the neon sign for the beggars and the whole nation to witness. The punishment of the female body in a dictatorial context is replaced by a memorial rite of ­self-­sacrifice. This is enacted to reclaim the public space once flooded with men, women and students who are now a ‘desolada ciudadanía’29 (‘desolate citizenship’).30 Throughout the novel, the rite is meticulously analysed, corrected and performed by E. Luminata for the group of beggars. She expects to achieve ‘la fiesta bautismal colectivizada … El griterío de la redimida’31 (‘the collectivised baptismal ceremony … The outcry from the redeemed one’).32 The voluntary violence inflicted upon the female body in Lumpérica becomes a subversive ritual of textual inscription in the public sphere. In Idelber Avelar’s words: ‘In a time when art no longer sang epic praises of political hope but could not avoid coming to terms with its social mode of existence either, ­self-­sacrifice often became the privileged gesture of immersion into the collective.’33 In hoping to displace the meaning of violence against the female body under dictatorial rule, Eltit also challenges fantasies of militaristic uniformity, order and monotony. Here, Eltit precisely uses what, it was previously mentioned, Scarry identifies as an important feature of physical pain: its ability to destroy language. This feature is crucially exploited by torturers, since it is an expression of what Scarry labels the ‘regimen’s fiction of power’.34 Language offers us the possibility of lifting out the pain into the world, eliminating it through the power of verbal objectification and the ­self-­extension of the person in pain. Yet, pain – specially the one produced by torture – quickly brings about p ­ re-­verbal sounds.35 Eltit seems to ­re-­use the cries, shrieks, groans, howls and fragments of speech produced by torture as a way of challenging the regime. An instance of this strategy occurs in the chapter entitled ‘Ensayo General’, a section that opens with a b ­ lack-­and-­white photograph. The image is of Diamela Eltit, seated and showing her profusely

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lacerated arms. In this section, Eltit describes with surgical accuracy how E. Luminata inflicts similar cuts and burns to her skin in the plaza. This scene is evocative of the photograph, but also of one of Eltit’s most ­well-­k nown artistic performances during the dictatorship, Maipú (1980).36 The writing in this section becomes even more disruptive, experimental and fragmentary than that of the preceding ones. Djelal Kadir has explained this procedure as Eltit’s effort to violate ‘the sanctioned norms of the novelistic genre as the masculinist tradition has willed it to posterity’.37 Yet, the emphasis on a­ vant-­garde writing techniques and political/personal violence against the body as text also suggests other connections. There is a succinct deployment of t­ rans-­gender/genre operations in the first three pages of this chapter. Each of these pages baffles the reader’s expectations of linearity and conventional narrative representation, producing plurisignification. The first page contains a single statement: ‘Muge/r/apa y su mano se nutre ­final-­mente el verde d ­ es-­ata y maya se erige y vac­/a-­nal su forma’38 (‘She moo/s/hears and her hand feeds m ­ ind-­ fully the green ­dis-­entangles and maya she erects herself sha­/m-­an and vac­/a-­nal her shape’).39 The second page continues this strategy, with another brief utterance: ‘Anal’iza la trama=dura de la piel: la mano prende y la fobia d es/garra’40 (‘She ­anal-­izes the plot = thickens the skin: the hand catches = fire and the phobia d is/members’).41 The third page concludes this sequence by claiming: ‘Muge/r’onda c­ orp-­oral Brahma su ma la mano que la denuncia & brama’42 (‘She moo/s/ urges round c­ orp-­oral Brahma her sig­/n-­ature ma lady man ual betrays her and she bronca Brahamas’).43 The laceration of the female body is not only exhibited by Eltit’s image, it is also syntactically and semantically invoked in the text. In the next pages, Eltit lingers over the meaning of such s­ elf-­inflicted incisions, exploring the disruptive possibilities of this practice applied to patriarchal ­culture: [el corte] rompe con una superficie dada [y] sobre esa misma superficie el corte parcela un fragmento que marca un límite distinto. El corte debiera verse como límite. El corte es el límite … es un arrebato a lo plano de la superficie de la piel a la que se divide rompiendo su ­continuidad.44 [the cut] breaks with a given surface. On this same surface the cut sections off a fragment that marks a different limit. The cut should be seen as a limit. The cut is the limit … is a seizure – it is a theft – on

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the plane of the skin’s surface which is divided by breaking its ­continuity.45

The presence of words such as ‘arrebato’, ‘fragmento’, ‘romper’, ‘plano’, ‘superficie’ and ‘continuidad’ already gives an indication of the meaning attached to the marking/writing of the body/text in Lumpérica. Eltit suggests the ways in which Lumpérica steps from dictatorial ideals of homogeneity and order into uncertainty and disorder, which, in the text, become liberating possibilities. One of the most ­self-­sacrificial scenes of the text is presented as highly subversive of the homogenising practices of the regime in cultural, literary and social terms. In repeating the cuts and burns inflicted by the dictatorship, Eltit’s gesture becomes politically loaded not as a sign of the brutality of the regime, but of its disruptive challenge to dictatorial uniformity. Ultimately, the ritualistic repetition of these gestures in the plaza ­re-­installs in the public sphere a necessary moment of national expiation, bonding the community. It also reinterprets as shared experience the violence inflicted upon others behind closed doors. The ­self-­immolation of E. Luminata in the name of the community will be r­ e-­enacted every night until the public sphere is reclaimed from dictatorial oppression. Ultimately, this is one of Lumpérica’s goals, a work produced under, as Eltit declared, ‘los efectos de un poder negativo, sórdido, acechante’46 (‘the effects of a negative, sordid, haunting power’). Initially, El Desierto seems to deploy images similar to those invoked by E. Luminata in Lumpérica. Laura Larco’s body is branded, and she is sacrificed in the name of the community. The locus of Pampa Hundida only reinforces this idea. Albeit fictitious, the town is an oasis located in the middle of the Atacama Desert. It is explicitly described as an old Andean settlement where human sacrifice has been an ancient ritual practice. That is why Laura’s letter to her daughter painfully describes the branding of her body, loaded with ceremonial o ­ vertones: El silencio era perfecto, sólo cortado por el silbido de la regla que caía, el chasquido del azote, y mi aullido (mi rugido, mi bufido, pero tantos habían gritado ahí). Los azotes caían del cielo a un ritmo exacto, inflexible. Y entre ellos el temblor exasperante de mi cuerpo los esperaba, el movimiento reflejo de mis músculos que se anticipaban a vibrar un segundo antes de que la madera fileteada de metal los t­ ocase.47 The silence was perfect, disturbed only by the whistling of the falling rule, the snap of the blow, and my howl (my bellow, my snort: but so many had screamed

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there!). The strokes fell from the skies with perfect rhythm, inflexible and between them the annoying shudder of my body awaited them: the reflex movement of my muscles which for a whole second were expecting to be made to shake before the ­metal-­edged wood actually touched t­ hem.48

Deliberately, Laura highlights the ritualistic aura of this moment when physical pain and patriarchal power come together. The actual agent of pain is, clearly, loaded with phallic meaning: a long wooden ruler with a steel edge. She is bent over, like a child, receiving brutal lashes in her buttocks. In addition, language falters for a moment. Laura’s physical pain precipitates a return to a ­pre-­verbal state, confirming Scarry’s claim regarding the power of extreme physical torment to destroy language. She also points out later how the scene takes place in the presence of the religious image icon of the town: Nuestra Señora de la Prosperidad de Pampa Hundida. Laura’s torturer removed it from the town’s basilica and relocated it to his quarters in the detention centre. The image acts as witness to Laura’s torment and a reminder of the expected model for women in a m ­ ale-­ dominated culture: the embodiment of n ­urturing-­ motherhood and chastity. Finally, Laura’s sacrifice also occurs within the context of similar and ancient practices in the Andean cultures of the Atacama region. This is the same location chosen for the detention camp. As Michael Malpass reminds us, human sacrifice was a central practice in, for instance, the Inca Empire (that extended over the Atacama Desert) in times of natural catastrophes or war.49 In fact, Pampa Hundida, as a s­ anctuary-­town in the middle of the desert, has become a place of sacred pilgrimage, devil dances and even animal sacrifice in honour of the religious icon. The detention centre and the ­sanctuary-­town, therefore, seem to be the appropriate places for Laura’s sacrifice in the name of Pampa ­Hundida. However, Laura’s s­ elf-­ representation as sacrificial victim confronts, rather than redeems, the community. In this sense, the ritualised violence against the female body serves a different purpose in El Desierto to Lumpérica’s immersion into the collective. Laura writes a letter not only to remember her story, but also to contest patriarchal practices of the community. In particular, she challenges tactics that recall the m ­ ale-­controlled memory strategies of the whole nation. It is to be noted that Laura’s sacrifice described in the above quotation is not entirely voluntary, as in the case of E. Luminata. Her sacrifice is the result of the pressures of

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the community represented by the town council. This group is almost entirely integrated by men: the mayor Boris Mamani, the doctor Ordóñez, the priest Penna, the notary Martínez, the baker Oliva and the widow Subiabre. Accordingly, she is the one the community sends to negotiate with Cáceres over the restitution of the sacred image and the more discreet handling of executions of political prisoners. Laura’s narration of her encounter with the council highlights the male chauvinism that defines the conception of women in a patriarchal culture, particularly when the community is violently t­ hreatened: ‘¡Todo el mundo se da cuenta cómo la mira el comandante! Usted también. No nos diga que no, no se haga la tonta. Vaya, se lo rogamos, a usted le hará caso …’. Y en la mano que aferraba el crucifijo colgante, en sus ojos aguados, en sus labios temblorosos o exigentes, pude leer claramente el resto de su parlamento: cuando a una mujer la miran es porque se deja mirar. Que yo me dejara mirar por el poder, por el supremo comandante de la zona en estado de sitio – o de guerra interior –, para que el pueblo recuperara su ­imagen.50 ‘Everyone knows how the commandant looks at you! And you do too. Don’t tell us you don’t, don’t act like such a fool. Go on, we beg you, he will listen to you …’ and in the hand clutching the hanging crucifix, in those watery eyes, on those trembling or demanding lips, I could read the rest of her speech quite clearly: when a woman is stared at, it’s because she lets herself be stared at. I should go and allow myself to be ogled so the people would get their little statue back. 51

For Laura, the retelling of the past and the narration of her sacrifice unmask the pacts and power dynamics of an entire patriarchal community. In so doing, Laura’s memories point towards silenced areas in democracy. They also uncover inconvenient agreements that help to explain the unleashing of dictatorial violence against certain members of the community. For René Girard, through ritual sacrifice ‘society is seeking to deflect upon a relatively indifferent victim, a “sacrificeable” victim, the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members, the people it most desires to protect’.52 Laura is such a ‘sacrificeable’ victim: a young, attractive woman and an outsider, since she was not born in Pampa Hundida. Laura’s descriptions of her encounters with Cáceres in the detention centre echo Girard’s definition of ritual sacrifice. In fact, the ‘petition’ to Laura is made by the mayor of the town, Mamani. Yet, he is not only the civil authority of Pampa Hundida, but also a descendant from ‘los curacas indígenas de la

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zona, los que habían mandado en el oasis desde mucho antes que existiera el país que ahora creía mandar allí’.53 (‘the indigenous curacas in the region, the ones who had been in control in the oasis for much longer than the country which thought itself in control there now’).54 He is, in other words, the appropriate patriarch for summoning this necessary ‘Andean sacrifice’ in times of catastrophe. In their first encounter, Cáceres tortures and sexually abuses Laura, a ritual that will be repeated six or seven times as Laura recalls in her letter. Her ‘sacrifice’ partly works. The image of the sacred icon is never replaced in the temple, but the executions start being discreetly ‘handled’ by Cáceres deep into the desert. Therefore, Laura presents her experience with dictatorial violence as a sacrificial moment founded not on an immersion into the collective, but on a patriarchal norm that links militaristic culture to civil society. Finally, Laura’s articulation of physical pain through language by objectifying its attributes – that is, by turning the reader’s attention towards agents and places of pain laden with patriarchal symbolism – helps expose the debased forms of power operating in dictatorial C ­ hile. If Lumpérica’s experimental linguistic operations provide liberating possibilities, Franz’s use of language suggests a different purpose in El Desierto. Laura’s critical, yet ambiguous position in the community is demonstrated in the language she uses to tell her story. This is especially evident when her narration focuses on her behaviour as judge of Pampa Hundida. Since the addressee of the correspondence is her inquisitive daughter, the letter is not only an attempt to represent the past, but also an effort to explain Laura’s questionable decisions and actions as the town’s judge. As a consequence, her language reflects her concern in accurately explaining her conduct. Her vocabulary intends to be precise, describing actions and decisions with care. However, she also adds an excessive number of subordinate clauses, delaying the definite expression of a thought or an observation. The resulting effect is, then, periphrastic and unclear. An instance of this is her attempt to explain her involvement with Cáceres: Sospeché (aunque sin palabras, como se sabe una luz) que había pactado con Cáceres no sólo porque estaba ‘agradecida’ de que no me hiciera sufrir más, y luego agradecida de que me hubiera entregado al prisionero que yo delaté bajo su – liviana – tortura; sospeché que había pactado no sólo por aquella complicidad, de la que hablaba Cáceres, la que esa traición mía había creado entre ambos; sospeché que había honrado el pacto que él me propuso no sólo por

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altruismo, o deseo de hacer justicia, o culpa por no haber sido capaz de hacerla de otro modo, no sólo por eso, ya que mi miedo era superior a cualquiera de esos motivos separados o reunidos; sospeché que había cumplido el pacto no por mera estupidez o inocencia, pues la estupidez y la inocencia de mi juventud habían sido devoradas por esas flores carnívoras desde el comienzo; sospeché que, si había honrado el pacto que Cáceres me propuso, debiendo saber que él no lo honraría, sólo podía ser por una razón (razón que naturalmente, pues tal era la naturaleza del pacto, yo no pude ver sino hasta que él me la indicó en el horizonte del salar).­55 I suspected (although wordlessly, the way one senses light) that I had made the pact with Cáceres not only because I was ‘grateful’ that he wouldn’t make me suffer any longer, and then felt gratitude that he had handed me the prisoner whom I betrayed under his – superficial – torture; I suspected that I had agreed to it not only because of the complicity that Cáceres had spoken of, which this betrayal of mine had created between us; I suspected that I had honoured the pact he had proposed not only out of altruism, or the desire to serve justice, or guilt for not having been capable of doing so in any other way, not only for that reason, since my fear was stronger than any of those motives individually or all together; I suspected that I had held up my end not merely through stupidity or innocence, since the stupidity and innocence of my youth had been devoured at the outset by those carnivorous flowers; I suspected that if I had held up my end of the pact that Cáceres had proposed when I should have known that he would not do so himself, this could only have been for one reason (a reason which, naturally, since such was the nature of the pact, I was unable to see until he pointed it out to me on the horizon of that sheet of sand).­56

This long paragraph concerning Laura’s pact with Cáceres shows how excessive clarifications, punctuation marks and repetitions are strategically mobilised to address her questionable conduct in the past. By doing this, these elements postpone the dissemination of information about the past and show Laura’s language to be intentionally circuitous. ‘Había pactado’, for example, seems to be insufficient for Laura to capture correctly the nature of her agreement with Cáceres. More words are required to grasp meaning: She adds ‘había honrado el pacto’, then she changes the periphrasis slightly to ‘había cumplido el pacto’ and then returns to the same phrase again, ‘había honrado el pacto’. The result of this abundance of periphrases is uncertainty, stretching rather than clarifying the point she is making about her agreement with the military regime embodied by Cáceres. I comment on this to show the differences between Lumpérica’s experimental linguistic utterances and Laura’s periphrastic

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language. Lumpérica confronts the way uniformity is perpetuated by a fixed vocabulary in militaristic culture. Laura’s symptomatic periphrases allude to the ambiguous use of language that secured constraining political pacts between the regime and the new elected government in the early 1990s. Moreover, Laura compulsively declares throughout her lengthy letter her struggles with language and writing about the past: ‘la letra se me enreda, convulsa, sobre las páginas de esta carta’, ‘he roto esta hoja de carta un par de veces’, ‘¿Cuántas veces he empezado esta página de esta carta, y la mano se ha negado a escribir?’, ‘¿Cuántas veces he arrugado y destrozado este papel, luego de tarjarlo con jeroglíficos intraducibles?’, ‘esta carta – lo sé bien, pero no puedo evitarlo – es un esfuerzo condenado por hacer inteligible lo indecible’ 57 (‘my handwriting is getting all messed up, convulsive, and I can’t let that happen’, ‘I’ve already torn up this page of the letter a couple of times’, ‘How many times have I begun this page of the letter, and my hand has refused to write?’, ‘How many times have I crumpled it up and torn it in pieces after crossing it out with meaningless hieroglyphics?’, ‘Even this letter – I know it well, but I can’t avoid it – is a failed effort to make the unspeakable intelligible’).58 Both Laura’s periphrases and uncertainty about linguistic representation are expressions of a particular use of language that shaped the practice of politics during the transitional years. Her circuitous narrative intimates a specific set of relations between the vague wording of reality in the aftermath of violence, a t­op-­down political discourse of an inconvenient past and the politics of memory of the transitional government. Perhaps the best example of linguistic ambiguity as strategy in ­top-­down political discourse is President Patricio Aylwin’s infamous formula regarding truth and justice after human rights violations. On 6 December 1990, Aylwin appropriately declared in a state dinner for the American President George B ­ ush: Nuestro primer empeño ha estado dedicado a promover una efectiva reconciliación nacional. Para conseguirlo es preciso cerrar las heridas que aún permanecen abiertas. Por estas razones, seguiremos haciendo todos los esfuerzos para buscar la verdad y hacer justicia, en la medida de lo posible, sobre todos los casos de violación a los derechos ­humanos.59 Our first effort has been devoted to promoting a real national reconciliation. To do so it is necessary to heal the wounds that are still

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open. For those reasons, we will continue doing everything in order to find the whole truth and justice, to the extent that it is possible, regarding human rights ­v iolations.

As Jorge Mera reminds us, the clause ‘truth and justice to the extent that it is possible’ quickly became a m ­ uch-­repeated principle and a guarantee of impunity in the reconstruction of civilian–military relations after the Dictatorship.60 The phrase was sufficiently vague not to unsettle military authorities and General Pinochet who remained as C ­ ommander-­in-­Chief of the Armed Forces until 1998. It also successfully prevented real advances in terms of truth and justice for the victims. In fact, Aylwin repeated almost obsessively the same formulaic dictum in December 1990 in two other speeches and in a televised message to the country in February 1991.61 Not surprisingly, Aylwin’s statement is explicitly invoked by the narrator and other characters in El Desierto. This assertion also troubles Laura as the ­re-­appointed judge of Pampa Hundida.62 Consequently, Laura’s use of language can be read as an expression of the vague utterances that permeated official discourses of the past in the early 1990s. A public discourse of national reconciliation, linguistically unclear or vacillating, due to the restrictive agreements made by the new authorities with the military regime to regain power. Laura’s use of language and narrative presents her as both critical of and complicit with the forces that attempt to keep the past out of the public sphere for political reasons. After all, as Laura admits to her daughter, ‘tal como sospechaste de mis filosofías, esta carta que te entregaré por mano tampoco será más que un baile en torno al abismo de mi pasado’ 63 (‘just as you were suspicious of my philosophies, this letter that I will deliver by hand will be nothing more than a dance around the abyss of my past’ ).­64

Understanding the traumatic ­past If Lumpérica laid the foundations for Eltit’s insubordinate fictions during the dictatorship years, Los Vigilantes (1994) signalled a different approach towards the fictional writing of the traumatic past. Naturally, the change of political discourses in the country impacted on Eltit’s fictions. A shift is noticeable towards the structuring of a new social order in the context of consensual politics as

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it appeared in the early 1990s. Lumpérica and Los Vigilantes approach the trauma of dictatorial rule from different contexts and critical positions. In Los Vigilantes, Eltit changed the focus from dictatorial rule to the residue of militaristic culture still operating in democratic Chile. The novel critically revises the optimism of the immediate ­post-­dictatorship years and gives way to a pessimism concerning the consensual political discourse in the country. This vision is developed by exploring the psychological impact on a single mother (Margarita) and her nameless child of a democracy kept ‘under surveillance’. Once again, the act of writing becomes a tool for contesting oppressive power structures in the novel. This materialises through several letters the mother writes to the absent father of her child. Despite his absence from the household, this man appears through the letters as a­ ll-­powerful and a member of the new democratic regime. Without dates or names, the letters offer a reply to the man’s demands, accusations and judgments regarding her lifestyle. Here lies the main difference between Los Vigilantes and Lumpérica. Whereas E. Luminata contests militaristic culture, Margarita in Los Vigilantes fails to find any means to question the existing power structures administered by the man. Through letters written by Margarita to him, the reader gleans the struggles of the woman to break free from his control in a reified and depoliticised Chilean society. This turns her into the embodiment of the devastated female victim in the aftermath of violence, recalling past experiences, decisions and events only at the request, and under the vigilant gaze, of men. In contrast, Laura in El Desierto seems to find the means to challenge not only militaristic culture, but also its residue in ­post-­dictatorial Chile through the use of intertextuality and s­elf-­reflection. In doing so, Laura seems to recover E. Luminata’s insubordinate drive, as it shapes official explanations of the past in democratic ­Chile. Through Margarita’s letters in Los Vigilantes, it is possible to detect how her articulations of the past are directly informed by the ­male-­controlled present she and her child inhabit. The way in which Eltit chooses to portray Chile in the early 1990s indicates the situation of women in bearing witness to the traumatic past. Margarita complains in her correspondence, but her voice is never heard. Her situation is created by the man and imposed on her. The optimism of the ­post-­dictatorship years has faded and old

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forms of ­state-­led control over the population seem to ­re-­emerge. The woman struggles within a democratic regime that is not invested in removing oppressive patriarchal structures. As Margarita ­states: Has adoptado conmigo los antiguos hábitos que ya habían caído en desgracia y que fueran repudiados incluso por la poderosa historia de la dominación que los hubo de eliminar por inhumanos, relegándolos a la historia de las barbaries. Pero tú, que tuviste noticias de esas horribles prácticas, las repusiste conmigo a pesar de saber bien que las antiguas víctimas se rebelaron y aunque muchas de ellas sucumbieran, otras lograron la liberación y la caída de esas salvajes ­costumbres.65 You’ve taken up the old ways with me, ways that long ago had fallen into disgrace and been repudiated even by the powerful history of domination that was obliged to eliminate them as inhuman, relegating them to the history of barbarities. But you, you who had heard about these horrible practices, revived them with me in spite of knowing very well that the victims of long ago rebelled and even though many of them succumbed, others achieved liberation and the defeat of these savage c­ ustoms.66

Dictatorial surveillance and harassment are some of these ‘old ways’. Margarita is caught between the abusive letters of the man and the vigilant attitudes of her neighbours and even her own child. In this context, Margarita struggles to write, and memory becomes a burden. In addition, the woman and the child live in extreme poverty as a result of the parental separation. In the context of neoliberal Chile, this results in the feminisation of poverty. The economic situation of the woman can only be understood as another form of dominion by the man. Her precarious situation is the direct consequence of his actions. Margarita explicitly states this in her letters: ‘Nos estamos consumiendo por tu causa. Ya no sé si es que vivo o solamente sobrevivo como un solitario ejercicio’67 (‘We are being consumed on account of you. I no longer can tell if I’m living or merely surviving as a solitary exercise’).68 From this position of economic dependency, the woman tries to resist the demands of the man but ultimately fails. This failure occurs because the man’s power expresses itself in economic, emotional and sexual terms, shaping Margarita’s situation. For example, the former partner still exerts control over Margarita’s body and sexuality. She defends herself from accusations of ‘malos

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hábitos’69 (‘bad habits’)70 and promiscuous ‘comportamiento genital’71 (‘genital conduct’)72 reported by neighbours to the man, while in fact she has been giving shelter to homeless families in the middle of winter.73 The man constantly censors, condemns and judges Margarita’s sexuality. This suggests an image of democratic Chile still shaped by the patriarchal control of the female body. But perhaps the most telling example of Eltit’s links between the patriarchies of dictatorial and democratic Chile comes from the situation of Margarita and her son in their community. As under the dictatorship, Margarita and the boy are constantly watched, stalked and talked about by her neighbours in order to ‘implantar las leyes, que aseguran, pondrán freno a la decadencia’74 (‘supports the neighbors’ instituting laws, which, they assert, could curb the decadence they observe’).75 Fear and paranoia describe Margarita’s plight in the present, even though she states that ‘se terminan por fin los tiempos agobiantes’76 (‘the oppressive weather is finally drawing to a close’).77 In this context, women are called to concur with the laws of the state, which, in Los Vigilantes, is represented by the man and the citizens of the c­ ommunity: Los vecinos luchan denodadamente por imponer nuevas leyes cívicas que terminarán por formar otro apretado cerco. Seremos pues apremiados por órdenes que carecen de legislación como no sea la multiplicidad de impulsos que promueven los ­vecinos.78 The neighbors struggle indefatigably to impose new civic laws that will result in the creation of another sealed cordon. Then we will be pressured by rules not backed by legislations unless it comes from the multiple impulses driving the n ­ eighbors.79

Through Margarita’s letters to the man, therefore, Eltit articulates Chile’s transition as a period of feminine constraint tightly linked to the military regime and patriarchal Hispanic culture. For these reasons, Margarita’s situation can be read as the embodiment of the mournful condition of Chilean society. A nation that struggles to bear witness to the traumatic past, in times of ‘una guerra silenciosa, una batalla muda y desproporcionada … el avasallamiento de la codicia’80 (‘a silent war, a mute, disproportionate battle … it’s subjugation by greed’).­81 Furthermore, the way in which Los Vigilantes links patriarchal culture with Pinochet’s regime and ­ post-­ dictatorial Chile also shapes the way Margarita remembers her past experiences. Her

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letters to the man can be read as an unsuccessful attempt to break free from the rule of patriarchal power in the aftermath of violence. This is suggested by the type of communication Margarita and the man use. He writes letters condemning and abusing Margarita. She always replies, surrendering to the man’s requests and accusations. Margarita is unable to ignore him or deflect his intimidations. Her writing is conditioned by the man’s power, placing her voice in a subordinate position. She is forced to give explanations and make pleas to the man. On one occasion, Margarita even apologises to him after the man’s mother makes an unpleasant visit, a woman that ‘indica, acusa, y descalifica todo lo que se le presenta ante su vista’82 (‘points out, accuses, and disparages everything her eye falls on’)83 and ‘propaga crueles noticias en la calle que comprometen y lesionan mi honra’84 (‘spreads cruel stories in the street that compromise and injure my honor’).85 The new democratic order, embodied in the text by the figure of the man, has been rebuilt upon Margarita’s ‘desmoronamiento, … silencio, y … obediencia’86 (‘my breaking down, my being silent and my being obedient’).87 The following passage shows the way in which Margarita’s memory is shaped by the requests of the man. In this situation, she must report to him about her past decision to shelter homeless families for several nights in the middle of winter. The man and the neighbours consider Margarita’s solidarity with the homeless to be dangerous and a deliberate breach of ‘el acuerdo de cerrar las puertas a los desamparados’88 (‘the agreement to lock our doors against the homeless’).89 Their attitude towards Margarita’s decisions and the dispossessed can be read as evidence of the new political discourse of ‘agreement’. In this context, Margarita struggles with memory, which increasingly becomes a b ­ urden: Permite que mi memoria esté en mejores condiciones, piensa que me es difícil conciliar el sueño desde que has multiplicado tus requerimientos. Dame un pequeño lapso de descanso y tendrás el informe, ese informe que con seguridad harás llegar a cada uno de mis acuciosos ­vecinos.90 Allow my memory to improve, think how hard it is for me to go to sleep since you have multiplied your requirements. Give me a little time to rest and you’ll have your report, the report you’ll surely send to each one of my accusing ­neighbors.91

The word ‘informe’ (report) suggests the lingering of a previous ideology in times of redemocratisation and its continued influence

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on the narration of the past. It implies obedience by drawing attention to the production of information in a context of patriarchal hierarchy. In the novel, surveillance, harassment and psychological abuse are the means for producing such ‘reports’ on women who do not comply with the dominant ideology. The consequence of this harassment for Margarita is that her memory practices are controlled by those in power. This is a problem that Eltit directly connects with the situation of women living under patriarchal rule. The letters show how Margarita accepts the rulings of her husband and introduces this paternal law into the home in order to raise their child. Perhaps the best example of this process of control is provided by the structure of the novel itself. The brief first section of Los Vigilantes opens with the chaotic, unspoken thoughts of the nameless son. He also spies on his mother, while she writes the letters to his father. As indicated earlier, the majority of the novel is epistolary in content. Yet, the last section of Los Vigilantes returns to the discourse of the child who has now begun to control Margarita’s writing and voice: ‘Ahora yo escribo. Escribo con mamá agarrada de mi costado que babea sin tregua’92 (‘Now I write. I write with Mama clutching my side, drooling without letup’).93 In fact, mother and child become almost a single entity at the end of the novel, but it is Margarita who is now voiceless as the boy assumes control over the narrative. Margarita’s situation in Los Vigilantes is symbolic of Chile’s transition from one patriarchal ideology (the a­ ll-­powerful, vigilant father, i.e. Pinochet) to another (equally vigilant of women, yet less oppressive, i.e. the man and the child). This transition is emphasised by a departure from the house, the dominion of the father. Roaming the streets, Margarita collapses and in that moment the child assumes control.94 Yet, this movement away from the vigilant eye of the man remains oppressive for Margarita. Older practices of the traumatic past are not totally absent in the immediate p ­ ost-­dictatorship years. This is especially the case of those violent practices exercised upon women. In fact, the child repeatedly mentions how ‘yo le pego en su cabeza de TON TON TON Ta’95 (‘I hit her on her head of a ­DUM-­DUM ­DUM-­My’).96 Margarita’s surrender is complete in the last two pages of the novel. Reduced to a bundle of urges, drooling and laughing uncontrollably, she even renounces writing as a liberating practice. The child states: ‘Mamá quiere que yo escriba los escasos pensamientos que tiene’97 (‘Mama wants me to write the

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few thoughts she has’).98 Despite a change in the political discourse, Chile is being rebuilt upon the foundations of old oppressive practices towards women. Remembrance, when possible, is an act of a victim hassled by external forces and most significantly by a power that is always ­masculine. Instead, El Desierto seems to find means for the repudiation of patriarchy through memory, s­elf-­ reflection and intertextuality. Laura’s s­elf-­ reflective attitude towards personal and collective trauma creates the conditions to contest two images associated with the female victim of dictatorial violence. First, the image of the victim paralysed in the present by traumatic memories of the past (for instance, Margarita in Los Vigilantes). Second, women as the ultimate victims of dictatorial violence and their compliance to the dominant memory discourses produced by those in power during ­democracy. The first image is connected to intertextuality as a narrative strategy. Unlike Margarita’s ­g uilt-­r idden responses to her husband, Laura’s letter is engaged in a dialogue with a wide range of ideas, philosophical theories and texts. As a consequence, the act of writing provides Laura with the time for meditating on the past. Intertextuality helps Laura to avoid becoming the mournful victim or the heroic survivor of political violence.99 Laura’s engagement with different texts suggests an alternative form of representing and understanding personal and collective traumatic experiences. Her readings of Friedrich Nietzsche challenge, for example, official discourses of the transitional governments. These discourses promoted the idea that compensation for victims should be better achieved through the legal system. Unsurprisingly, the Law became the foundation of the new democracy in a naturally reconciled national family. Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy plays a crucial role in Laura’s understanding of justice in Chile. This dichotomy is developed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), a text that Laura quotes often in her letter. Nietzsche discriminates between two drives that shape life. On the one hand, man requires individuality to experience the world, a clear sense of self and distinction from others. For this to be possible, he must experience the world as something logical, patterned, intelligible and responsive to his purposes. Thanks to Apollo, ‘the god of individuation and of the boundaries of justice’,100 life unfolds in a world capable of a rational explanation. But Nietzsche also argues that

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this world is an illusion. The Apollonian world is certainly logical, but in this world, happiness is also fleeting and death inevitable. In order to overcome this pessimistic take on existence, life must embrace a principle oblivious to the futility of life and that glories in itself. This is the Dionysian drive. As Dionysus, man immerses himself into the hysteria, the orgiastic of the collective, causing ‘subjectivity to vanish to the point of complete ­self-­forgetting’.101 In doing so, Apollonian individuality and rationality falters. The anguish of the futility of life is momentarily suspended by a feeling that Nietzsche labels Dionysian intoxication. Attic tragedy, Nietzsche concludes, perfectly condensed this vision of life as a drama between these two essential principles. However, with the arrival of Socratic rationalism, a vision of life that excluded Dionysus and that embraced only reason, order and morality as the path towards human happiness, tragedy perished and disappeared.102 Laura equates the legal discourses and memory policies of the transitional governments with the Apollonian principle and Socratic rationalism. Following Nietzsche, she considers post-­ dictatorial justice and the politics of memory during the transition to be Apollonian illusions. In these discourses, the driving force is the restoration of reason, order and morality in a rebuilt vision of a patriarchal world. The violence, transgressions and excesses of the past are conveniently excluded from this ­idea. Laura, therefore, does not understand or represent the coup and the violence unleashed against women as an interruption to the republican tradition of the country. Dictatorial violence is, to some extent, an example of the Dionysian forces that Laura personally experienced. Yet, testimonies of victims tend to perpetuate the illusion that the irruption of ­state-­sanctioned violence was an exceptional event in Chile’s long democratic history. As Steve Stern points out, for those who personally experienced violence at the hands of the state, ‘the military government brought the country to a hell of death and torture, both physical and mental, without historical precedent or moral justification, and that hell continues’ in democratic Chile.103 Such interpretations of dictatorial violence provide the origins for the ‘never again’ project of the transitional government. This is a policy promised and perpetuated by civil, official and military authorities, and that Laura openly rejects in the text. It is no coincidence that Laura’s former law professor, an advocate of the ‘as much justice as possible’ policy and consensual

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approach to ­post-­dictatorial justice, is the new Minister of Justice in democratic ­Chile: Esto no lo supo, no lo leyó mi maestro y el tuyo, don Benigno Velasco, esa línea escapó a su exégesis, Claudia. ‘Sean como yo, la madre original, quien, creando constantemente, encuentra satisfacción en el turbulento flujo de las apariencias.’ Cómo podría la ley de Velasco haber entendido ese ‘flujo de apariencias’; él, que nos enseñaba una continuidad, un progreso dialéctico (que naturalmente conducía a él); él, que se reía cuando al final del curso nos revelaba que habíamos llegado dionisíacos, y nos íbamos irremediablemente apolíneos.­104 My teacher and yours, don Benigno Velasco, never knew this, had never read it; this line escaped his exegesis, Claudia. ‘Let them be like me, the original mother, who, creating constantly, finds satisfaction in the turbulent flow of appearances.’ How could Velasco’s notion of law have understood this ‘flow of appearances’? He was the one who taught us continuity, a dialectic process (which naturally led to him); who laughed when at the end of the course he revealed to us that we had arrived as Dyonisians and were leaving as incurable ­Apollonians.105

This long reflection that interrupts Laura’s retelling of past events suggests her interest in challenging dominant ideas about violence, truth and justice. Velasco’s idea of justice suits the politics of memory for those in power: reasonable, consensual and strategic, in order to guard a still fragile democracy. After all, thanks to these policies, Cáceres lives unpunished in the ruins of the detention camp. Through her interpretation of Nietzsche, Laura attempts to disrupt a consolidated image of violence and justice in democratic ­Chile. In voicing her readings on issues about truth, testimony and justice, Laura’s narrative memory escapes the constraints of her trauma. In doing so, Laura seems to recover E. Luminata’s insubordinate drive against militaristic culture, while also finding a critical position at some distance from Margarita’s harassed post-­ ­ dictatorial situation. Laura’s critique focuses not only on militaristic culture. It also uncovers the remains of dictatorial rule and culture in democratic Chile. In particular, sexualised violence becomes the starting point for broader meditations about the traumatic past. Laura avoids fixating on violence against herself and, in doing so, transforms the ‘mourning’ of violence into a ‘meditation’ about violence in personal and public contexts. Perhaps the most telling example of this appears after Laura

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narrates one of her many sessions of torture and sexual abuse carried out by Cáceres: Sobre lo que no es posible hablar es preferible callar, dijo aquel inescrutable converso. Mi mano ha tachado varias veces esta página, he clavado en ella la punta del lápiz hasta agujerearla, he sentido que no bastaba con arrugarla y arrojarla lejos, que no bastaría con echármela a la boca y devorarla y luego vomitarla, que sería necesario encontrar una forma de hablar que fuera como callar . . . Hablar de lo que había hecho mi lengua: del modo como había lamido el canto de acero de la norma, del mismo modo como antes había confesado dónde estaba el prisionero, al que ridículamente había creído poder amparar, y al que había entregado, … Hablar de todo lo que había hecho mi lengua, y enseguida cortármela.­106 (What we cannot talk about, we must consign to silence, said that inscrutable Viennese, Wittgenstein. My own hand has scratched out this page several times, and I’ve pressed the pen point down into it so hard that I’ve punched it full of holes. I felt it wouldn’t be enough simply to crumple it up and throw it away; nor would filling my mouth with it and swallowing it to vomit up again later on suffice either. I would have to find a way of speaking that would be like keeping quiet …. A way of speaking about what my tongue had done: about the way it had licked the steel edge of the norm, the way it made me confess where the prisoner was, the one whom I so ridiculously thought myself capable of helping but whom I had handed over to his death … A way of speaking about everything my tongue had done, and then immediately cutting it out of me.) ­107

The allusion to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s final proposition of his Tractatus ­Logico-­Philosophicus (1921) is quite revealing of Laura’s reflexive attitude towards memory and the past: ‘what we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’.108 At one level, it shows Laura’s complex intellectual education and academic life. At a deeper level, it also shows Laura’s interest in understanding the central problem of philosophy as addressed by Wittgenstein but applied to her past experiences. At the heart of the Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s theory of language and logic. In his view, the proper way of dealing with the problems of philosophy is by addressing the logic of our language. In this sense, by charting the limits of language, Wittgenstein aims to chart the limits of thought. Through logic, Wittgenstein aims to clearly distinguish meaningful propositions from nonsensical ­ pseudo-­ propositions.109 Hence, his summary of the meaning of the whole text: ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we

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must pass over in silence’.110 As with Nietzsche’s dichotomy, Laura embraces Wittgenstein’s ideas in order to draw attention to the limitations of language and the constructions of discourses about the traumatic past: ‘incluso esta carta – lo sé bien pero no puedo evitarlo – es un esfuerzo condenado por hacer inteligible lo indecible. Esfuerzo derrotado de antemano y que, sin embargo, debo hacer para que no nos gane el silencio’111 (‘Even this letter – I know it well, but I can’t avoid it – is a failed effort to make the unspeakable intelligible. An effort defeated beforehand, and which nonetheless I must make in order to prevent silence from gaining the upper hand’).112 What Laura remembers and writes is complemented by what cannot be said or what she cannot testify through language. This is an important lesson for her daughter and is crucial to understanding Laura’s way of avoiding the role of the mournful victim. Language shapes and limits reconstructions of the past. Even though Laura confesses to her daughter her attraction to Cáceres, her betrayal to an escaped prisoner, and her inability to prevent the death sentences of political prisoners in Pampa Hundida’s camp, there are still things that cannot be explained or narrated of her past and actions. From Laura’s thoughtful perspective, the traumatic past is not only a matter of straightforward recollection, but also of continuous ‘meditation’.

Victims and ­perpetrators Laura’s distinctive way of examining her past also turns her testimony into a meditation on the limits that separate victims and perpetrators. This is the second gendered image of women the novel seems to contest. What distinguishes El Desierto from previous similar fictions is the fact that the text does not remain confined within the limits of discourses that clearly differentiate between a typically feminine victim and a male perpetrator. To some extent, El Desierto can be read as a representation that complicates such a Manichean dichotomy. However, its fluid treatment of this opposition is not free from problems. This is especially evident when considering the text’s portrayal of the ambivalent relationship between Laura and Cáceres. This is also evident, for example, when assessing the interplay of narrative voices that structure the text and its representation of the p ­ ast.

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Initially, El Desierto seems to represent Laura only as a victim of the dictatorship. The way in which her testimony is structured in the novel conveys the idea that her letter is a harassed body. This works as a metaphor for her experiences with Cáceres. The first element that conveys this idea concerns issues of narrative order. For instance, the sequence in which events are presented in Franz’s text reinforces the image of the tormented female body. Laura’s past is arranged as a constant series of interruptions or fragmentations of her testimony. Laura’s letter is chopped into parts that are spread throughout the novel. These parts always appear after major sections that inform the reader about the situation of Laura and Claudia, both in the present and their past in exile. The novel opens with a chapter where an omniscient narrator introduces Laura arriving at Pampa Hundida. It describes her motivations for moving back there from Berlin. Only after this opening is the first of the many ‘pieces’ of Laura’s testimony presented to the reader. At the end of the novel, the arrangement of sections is equally significant. After the last pages of Laura’s letter, the novel includes two more chapters. There is a chapter about the death of Cáceres described by the omniscient narrator. There is also an epilogue where the masculine identity of this omniscient narrator is revealed, complicating the authorship of Laura’s letter. This arrangement of events in the novel can be read in two ways. On the one hand, Laura’s written testimony – as her body during torture sessions with Cáceres – is subjected to a process of manipulation and subjugation. On the other, her fragmented testimony is always ‘cornered’, ‘delimitated’ and ‘harassed’ by other sections of the story, sections symbolically narrated by an omniscient masculine ­voice. This structure of events is connected to a second narrative element that conveys the initial representation of Laura as victim: the voice. In thinking about the experience of torture and sexualised violence in El Desierto, it is important to consider the position of the character who remembers the violence in the narrative. A question about ‘shattered’ voices necessarily demands further interrogations regarding the place of language in torture. Scarry argues that, unlike other forms of intense pain experienced in ­non-­political contexts, the one produced by torture disintegrates the world, the self and the voice of the person under attack. During confession, the torturer forces the prisoner to acknowledge the

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fact that the pain inflicted is destroying all these realities. This, of course, is a crucial part of the process of torturing a prisoner. That is why, the prisoner’s confession – the content of the prisoner’s answers – is only partially important to the regime. What matters is the fact that the prisoner is answering the questions as a consequence of the intense pain inflicted. When this happens, Scarry points out, the voice of the prisoner is nearly lost, since when he or she utters a few words while experiencing extreme physical agony, it is similar to saying: ‘yes, all is almost gone now, there is almost nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another’.113 Due to extreme physical torment, the prisoner surrenders his or her voice to the torturer’s power. An instance of this can be detected in El Desierto. This example will help us to demonstrate the patriarchal ­co-­optation of Laura’s voice in order to produce a narrative of the traumatic past for strategic ­reasons. The plot of El Desierto unfolds through two voices. Yet, it is only the last section of the novel that clarifies the masculine identity of the second of these. This is a crucial moment to understand the ‘authorship’ of the whole text. As mentioned earlier, the narrative is arranged around the story of Laura and Claudia in democratic Chile and the story of Laura during the first months of the regime. These two distant moments in Laura’s life are reported by both third- and fi ­ rst-­person narrators. Significantly, the novel opens with the ­third-­person narrator, an omniscient voice who describes Laura’s return to Pampa Hundida. This gesture indicates from the beginning of the novel that Laura is subordinate to the voice of the omniscient narrator. His voice seems to ‘overpower’ Laura’s testimony or restricts its authority. An idea of this power can be detected in the opening paragraph of the n ­ ovel: Lo primero que Laura reconoció, al adentrarse en la vasta llanura desértica que rodeaba el oasis de Pampa Hundida, fue el horizonte de aire líquido. La muralla del espejismo temblaba en el horizonte del desierto, atravesando la autopista: una catarata de aire hirviente manando del cielo quemado por el reflejo de los salares cayendo sobre el lecho del mar que se había ausentado un millón de años antes. Por un instante, tras ese muro de calor que palpitaba como un cristal recién fraguado, Laura creyó ver enormes rostros, siluetas humanas gigantescas, bocas distorsionadas, que gritaban en su dirección, que apelaban a ella, pidiéndole o enrostrándole algo

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inaudible, el dolor de una deserción tan larga como el millón de años transcurrido desde que el mar se evaporó de esas ­pampas.114 The first thing Laura recognised as she got further into the vast barren flatness that surrounded the oasis of Pampa Hundida was the horizon of liquid air. The wall of trembling mirages on the desert horizon lay across the highway: a cataract of seething air flowing from the sky, scorched by the reflection from the salt flats (the remains of ancient salt marshes), and falling upon the bed of the ocean that had withdrawn itself a million years before. Beyond that wall of heat palpitating like newly hardened glass, Laura thought for a moment she could see enormous faces, gigantic human figures, distorted mouths that were screaming in her direction, appealing to her, begging her or reproaching her for some inaudible thing, the ache of a desertion as prolonged as the million years that have elapsed since the seas evaporated from those ­plains.115

The traditional verifying t­hird-­person past tense voice of history and realism is installed at the beginning of the novel. In addition, the focalisation of this voice reinforces its authority. In the above quotation, as in the rest of the novel, the narrator’s level of focalisation is zero. This narrator is by definition capable of reporting not only events, but motives and unspoken thoughts of the characters. In the above quotation, the narrator is able to report not only on Laura’s actions, but also on her haunting ‘visions’ in the desert: a ghostly, yet subtle introduction of the disappeared by the regime and Laura’s implication in this unresolved tragedy. The narrator demonstrates its ­all-­k nowing narrative power, suggested through the description of the desert and its ancient geological changes. This quality is particularly significant in relation to Laura as a survivor of violence during the regime. She will be able to ‘tell’ her story only ‘after’ the introduction of this powerful voice that shapes the text as a ­whole. However, Franz seems not only to provide elements that reinforce the idea of Laura as a victim of the dictatorship. By portraying the relationship between Laura and Cáceres as it develops, the clear distinction between victim and perpetrator is questioned. In this sense, it can be argued that Laura mobilises the image of the female victim and the male perpetrator in her letter, only to challenge their clear separation. As already mentioned, Laura’s voice participates in the ordering of events in the novel through her letter. This written testimony aims to become an answer to a

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l­ong-­awaited question posed by her daughter: ‘¿Dónde estabas tú, mamá, cuando todas esas cosas horribles ocurrieron en tu ciudad?’116 (‘Where were you, Mamá, when all those horrible things were taking place in your city?’).117 The events alluded to in the question are, certainly, the disappearances of political prisoners by the regime in the months following the coup. As Pampa Hundida’s judge at that time, Laura is directly implicated in the ratification of illegal court martial sentences against civilians and their disappearance. But the letter is more than an answer to that question, since it is also a meditation on the ambiguous process of fascination of Laura with her torturer. This relationship, Laura reveals in the letter, is Claudia’s origin. The portrayal of this liaison is Franz’s attempt to highlight the ambiguous complicity between a torturer (Cáceres) and his victim (Laura). This becomes a metaphor for the relationship between the ­all-­powerful dictator and his compliant community during dictatorial rule, but also extends itself to Chilean society in the early 1990s. For example, the clear separation between Laura as the victim and Cáceres as the perpetrator is blurred when Laura’s attraction to Cáceres and his humanity is mentioned. Even though Cáceres, as the officer in charge of Pampa Hundida’s detention camp, represents the authority and violence of the military regime, he is described by Laura in an ambivalent fashion: ‘Se diría que es bello, si un dolor forrado en piel humana pudiera ser bello’118 (‘I would say he looks handsome, if an ache sheathed in human skin can be called handsome’).119 This ambivalence is further intensified with recourse to a vocabulary of affectionate overtones. Laura alternately describes him as a man of ‘ojos taciturnos, o acaso adoloridos’120 (‘taciturn eyes or maybe sorrowful ones’)121, a soldier tormented by an existential ‘melancolía’122 (‘melancholia’)123 and ‘tristeza’124 (‘nostalgia’).125 At the same time, Laura constantly alludes to the ‘pact’ made with Cáceres in the name of ‘ justice’. For Laura, this agreement gives her the chance to save the lives of twelve civilians sentenced to death by the regime. Cáceres promises to spare the life of a prisoner each time they ­re-­enact their first episode of torture and sexualised violence. Even though the pact is a lie (Cáceres cannot ignore his orders or the chain of command), Laura accepts his proposal. In doing so, Laura consequently represents herself not only as an unwilling victim of violence, but also as victim by c­ onsent:

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Yo había deseado sufrir, había deseado ser víctima, había deseado encarnar la norma de mi época, me había complacido repetir, ritualmente, la primera noche en la que fui medida y mi medida fue la traición. Una traición no sólo al fugitivo al que había intentado amparar, una traición no sólo a mis altísimos principios de joven jueza idiota, sino la traición de mi propio cuerpo a mí misma, cuando éste me desconoció y me precipitó en ese orgasmo negro colgada del cuello de mi ­verdugo.126 I had wanted to suffer, had wanted to be a victim, had wanted to incarnate the principles of my own epoch, had taken pleasure in repeating, ritually, that first night on which I was measured and when that measuring was my betrayal. A betrayal not only of the fugitive I had attempted to protect, a betrayal not only of my highest principles as a foolish, young judge, but also a betrayal of myself in my own body when the latter disowned me and precipitated me into that black orgasm while hanging from my executioner’s n ­ eck.127

In contrast to this portrayal, many real testimonies of female victims of sexualised violence of the regime show a tendency to model their narratives for a purpose: to contribute to the prosecution of agents of the repression. In these texts, accusation tends to prevail. Memory in these narratives is a means to access crucial information that can be used in judicial instances. Some examples of these texts in Chile are the testimonies of Luz Arce, Marcia Merino and Carmen Rojas.128 These texts privilege the representation of the agents and torturers as enraged and arrogant underclass. This is discarded in El Desierto. Instead, Laura’s recollection of Cáceres accentuates her attraction to the man. In doing so, Laura’s relationship with her torturer becomes an example of the “Stockholm syndrome”. In fact, the first time they meet, she describes the scene in ways that represent Cáceres as a ­god-­like figure in the central nave of Pampa Hundida’s cathedral. Laura states Cáceres ‘comes down’ from the altar in the temple ‘as if descending from heaven’.129 The main consequence of this strategy of representation in El Desierto is the repudiation of stereotypical images associated with the helpless female victims and the sadistic male perpetrators. In doing so, Franz’s novel provides a more nuanced representation of the actors involved in Chile’s recent historical trauma. It also demystifies the sanctity associated with victims and the perversion of perpetrators. In fact, Franz has commented on this aspect of the novel in interviews, stating: ‘la novela es antimaniquea, e incluso políticamente incorrecta: los buenos llevan también un malo dentro’ (‘this is an a­ nti-­Manichean

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and politically incorrect novel: there’s also evil inside the good guys’),130 and regarding the character of Cáceres: ‘es un verdugo sensible, un astrónomo aficionado, un malo con aspectos buenos, y [que] estableció una relación erótica con su víctima’ (‘He is a sensitive hangman, an amateur astronomer, a bad guy with good features [who] developed an erotic relationship with one of his victims’).­131 Franz’s representation of both figures in El Desierto can also be criticised. Laura’s representation of the past is certainly a critique of the influence of patriarchy in dictatorial and transitional narratives of military rule. Yet, it is also necessary to bear in mind that Laura’s sadomasochistic relationship with Cáceres remains highly patriarchal and, consequently, conventional. This reveals the extent to which the novel struggles to imagine a different type of relationship between men and women. As Foucault states, sadomasochism can also be a liberating practice, especially from the imperatives of patriarchy that Franz seems to r­ einforce: [Sadomasochism] is the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously … We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body, through the eroticization of the body. I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasure, I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so ­on.132

Contrary to this vision of sadomasochism, Franz reinforces patriarchal imperatives of feminine submission, male domination and genitally based sexuality. After all, Laura ambiguously surrenders to Cáceres (an ­all-­powerful and manly figure) and not the other way round. In addition, their ‘pact’ involves the ­re-­enactment of Laura’s rape, after being brutally battered on her buttocks by Cáceres with a wooden ruler. In one of these sessions, Laura even climaxes. These encounters result in Laura’s pregnancy, consummating a patriarchal ‘claim’ of reproduction. The sadomasochistic relationship between Laura and Cáceres that Franz articulates to represent the ambiguities of the past perhaps unwittingly becomes itself a confirmation of a system of domination. Despite Laura

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being an ambiguous victim of dictatorial violence and Cáceres a ‘verdugo sensible’ (‘sensitive hangman’), their relationship remains a performance of p ­ atriarchy. But perhaps the most crucial problem regarding El Desierto’s subtle, yet patriarchal, representation of the female victim of human rights violations refers to the issues of voice and authorship. As discussed previously, Laura’s voice in the structure of the novel appears to be ‘overpowered’ by an omniscient narrator. Throughout the entire novel the reader never questions the authenticity of Laura’s voice or letter to Claudia. In the concluding part of the novel, however, her voice and the legitimacy of her letter are undermined. In this section, the novel introduces a final narrative voice that redefines the status of the omniscient narrator and of Laura’s testimony. This voice belongs to Mario, Laura’s ­ex-­husband, journalist and chronicler of the events narrated in the novel. Mario’s use of Laura’s letter is particularly interesting. The final chapter describes how Laura throws the letter into the air when thousands of pilgrims charge against the ruins of Pampa Hundida’s detention centre. Cáceres dies trampled and crushed by the mob. The destiny of the letter is clarified by ­Mario: En los días siguientes yo recogí, aquí y allá, dispersos en la pampa, fragmentos con la clara caligrafía de Laura. Los fui ordenando, pegando, llenando los vacíos con mi propia imaginación, intentando armar con mi memoria y mi sospecha el mosaico imposible de un relato. Con los años, de vez en cuando, todavía, el viento arremolinado que pasa sobre el oasis … acarrea desde el desierto un nuevo fragmento de la carta … Yo lo persigo … y cuando lo alcanzo lo agrego a los demás trazos y trozos que he reunido, le hago un hueco entre mis ficciones y mis recuerdos, modifico mi narración.­133 In the succeeding days, here and there, I picked up fragments showing Laura’s clear calligraphy, bestrewn around on the pampa. I’ve been gradually putting them in order, matching them and fitting them in, filling in the empty spots with my own imagination, trying with my memory and my assumptions to assemble the impossible mosaic of a tale. With the years, even now, from time to time, the eddying breeze passing above the oasis … blows in a new fragment of that letter … I follow it … and when I get it I add it to the other bits and chunks I’ve brought together, find a spot for it among my stories and memories, modify my n ­ arration.134

In doing this, Franz undermines the importance of who actually remembers and narrates the past in the text. Initially, El Desierto

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seems to give voice to a female victim of dictatorial violence, while representing a more suggestive image of the actors involved in Chile’s recent tragedy. But in the last section, Franz d ­ e-­legitimises Laura’s voice. Laura’s written testimony, as her body during torture sessions, is subject to a form of intervention. Her voice and text are manipulated by a man: either Mario or the ­third-­person narrator he uses to tell the story of Laura and Claudia in democratic Chile. The text is a fragmented testimony, an incomplete narrative and, crucially, one filtered, modified and produced by a man. Certainly, the image of fragments of the letter, endlessly hovering in the desert as Mario tries to pick them up, suggest his inability to control the narrative. Yet, Laura does not even have the opportunity to participate in this structuring of the narrative. The traumatic past appears as a historical referent where the boundaries between victims and perpetrators are ultimately portrayed by the same patriarchal voices that narrate history. Despite the novel’s efforts, El Desierto is partially unable to imagine a narrative of the past where the controlling voice of a masculine figure can be divested from such ­power. This chapter has considered a variety of narrative elements of El Desierto such as intertextuality, ­ self-­ reflection, periphrastic language and narrative voices. The purpose of their analysis was to show how they challenge certain gendered images of the female victim of dictatorial violence. Previous Chilean fictions of the dictatorship and official discourses of the past presented women as: the scapegoat sacrificed in the name of the community; the traumatised victim in the aftermath of violence; and as ultimate sufferers. Comparing the novel with Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica allowed us to demonstrate how El Desierto evokes the image of the sacrificial victim as the basis for rebuilding a negotiated transition to democracy, where patriarchal structures shape dominant narratives of the past and continue the oppression of women in the public sphere. The image of the traumatised victim after conflict depicted in Los Vigilantes allows Eltit to challenge the optimism of the p ­ ost-­dictatorship years and its narrative of a reconciled Chilean family. In Los Vigilantes, Eltit suggests there are no means for women to challenge the r­ e-­emergence of dictatorial practices. In the novel, memory becomes a burden and the product of a ­male-­controlled democratic regime. El Desierto seems to find such

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means through its use of intertextuality and s­ elf-­reflection. Laura’s thoughtful approach to her experiences allows her to understand the past as a matter for constant meditation rather than for neurotic fixation. In addition, El Desierto offers examples of an anti-­ Manichean approach to the representation of dictatorial rule and feminine victimhood. Ultimately, though, it struggles to imagine instances where the relationship between victims and perpetrators does not become a performance of a patriarchal and heteronormative system of domination. The fact that El Desierto also structures the representation of a woman’s experiences of dictatorial violence and injustice exclusively with recourse to a male narrative voice ultimately limits the extent to which the novel can be understood to challenge the patriarchal control of the politics of memory in the aftermath of conflict. Franz’s El Desierto challenges dominant images of representation of female victims in social discourses of the past. However, it fails to imagine a space where they are free from the action of patriarchal control (especially in a democratic context of enunciation). Franz’s novel is still anchored to a masculinist idea of the fictional representation of the past, the construction of history and of social memory. In other words, it struggles to move beyond such lines of thought to allow women’s memories and voices to be freely heard after violence.

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Chapter ­2

Militants, Wives and Mothers in Jamás el Fuego Nunca and Libreta de ­Familia

This chapter focuses on the memory strategies of leftist women in a later novel by Diamela Eltit, Jamás el Fuego Nunca (2007), and Libreta de Familia (2008) by Pía González. The novels critically engage with the practices of s­ ubject-­formation that affected women in the ­anti-­Pinochet movements during the dictatorship. They focus on the memories of a former female guerrilla militant (Eltit) and the widow of a social and political activist (González). In Eltit’s novel, the woman remembers her involvement with guerrilla movements during Pinochet’s regime and the consequences of radical political militancy in the aftermath of violence. In González’s text, the novel tells the story of Laura and Nicolás, a young married couple associated with opposition groups and the Christian left during the dictatorship. More than twenty years after Nicolas’s death, Laura revisits the past through a series of e­ -­mail exchanges with a friend. This situation becomes the opportunity to remember those years and how she deferred her own activism for the sake of her marriage and, later, to be a mother. In both texts, the construction of women as radical guerrilla militants, wives or mothers becomes the source of conflict. This problem arises through the tension between the memory discourses of the ­anti-­Pinochet movements and these women’s personal recollections of the dictatorship. In this sense, both novels offer a critique of dominant discourses and gendered images mobilised by groups in opposition to Pinochet. They do so with recourse to narrative strategies that depart from realist aesthetics and denunciatory p ­ olemic.

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The structure of this chapter aims to highlight the main characters’ critical distance from these m ­ ale-­ controlled opposition movements and their deeply gendered memory narratives. It first contextualises the production of Chilean novels about the dictatorship – chiefly done by male writers – through characters politically affiliated with the left. It also discusses the literary productions of these authors – traditionally associated with Allende’s political project and the opposition movements during the dictatorship. This section situates the works of Eltit and González within this particular type of p ­ost-­ coup and ­post-­dictatorial Chilean fiction. This group of texts can be broadly described as committed to the memory of the defeated left and mostly produced by male novelists. The following sections focus on a comparative analysis between Jamás el Fuego Nunca and Libreta de Familia. They pay particular attention to their use of narrative strategies as a way of challenging the left’s gendered practices of identity-­ ­ formation. The second section discusses both texts in terms of militancy and the gendered roles of women within these dissident groups. This section demonstrates how the renunciation of realist narratives in each text helps to dismantle the gendered politics of representation in two groups: the armed guerrilla movements and the Chilean Christian left. In the last section, the discussion focuses on motherhood as a common experience for the protagonists of both novels and reflects on the anxiety this condition creates for political commitment. It will be argued that both novels can also be read as displacing traditional images of leftist mothers mourning the disappearance of their children in the public sphere. In Eltit’s text, this process is part of an attempt to depoliticise motherhood through memory. The aim is to show how oppressive aspects of leftist radical militancy are experienced by women. In the case of González, the stereotypical representation of the mother reveals masculinist structures operating within Christian a­ nti-­Pinochet movements. It is explored how they used motherhood to advance a reconciled image of the traditional Chilean family in the aftermath of c­ onflict.

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The Chilean novel, the dictatorship and the ­left In his 2013 study of Chilean novels of the dictatorship published between 1977 and 2010, Mario Lillo identifies three ways of addressing Pinochet’s coup and its consequences for Chile’s national identity.1 These are the different ‘intensities of memory’ that Chilean narratives produce in the aftermath of the coup and since the return to democracy. First, a particular group of texts proposed a comprehensive memory of individual and collective historical traumas as consequences of dictatorial rule. This group of novels is characterised by its denunciatory agenda and interest in the recovery of collective narratives of the past from groups in opposition to the military regime. At the other end of the spectrum, Lillo identifies a group of significant novels written and published after 1973 that ignore the representation and memory of the coup, together with the political context of the country. Reasons for this choice, Lillo states, vary from the writers’ need to avoid open conflict or personal hazard to a conscious effort to negate the reality of political violence in the country at the time.2 Therefore, the dictatorial years in these novels appear as times characterised by the lack of any historical conflict. The third and final group of texts shows a less radical involvement with literary memorialisation when confronting the legacy of the military regime. Since the return to democracy, the majority of Chilean novelists after 1990 only alluded to the country’s recent traumatic history in tangential fashion. In this sense, these narratives opted not to fulfil the demands of other social and cultural groups at that time: that novelists should contribute to the recovery of Chile’s collective ­memory.3 Since the mid-1990s, this sense of literary obligation to the memory of the recent past has fuelled academic debates over the need for a ­socio-­historical Chilean novel of the dictatorship.4 In fact, Lillo’s study is but the most recent contribution to the debate. In his study, Lillo contests the assumption that this group of Chilean novels has not settled its ‘historical debt’ with the memory of the dictatorship. Lillo’s argument, regarding the way literature confronts memories of the past, echoes Idelber Avelar’s argument about ­ post-­ dictatorial Latin American fiction and the task of mourning.5 Naturally, the arrival of democracy reshaped the cultural context for the writing of fiction. As Carlos Franz points out about Chile’s new democratic r­ egime:

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se levantaba el mandamiento histórico y entrábamos en un periodo de libertad creativa, en donde podíamos evitar hacernos cargo de dos cosas: la literatura de anuncio … y también dejar atrás la literatura de denuncia. Ni anuncio ni d ­ enuncia.6 the historic obligation ended and we started a period of creative freedom where two things could be avoided: propagandist literature … and also denunciatory literature. Neither leaflet nor ­denunciation.

For Lillo, p ­ ost-­ dictatorial Chilean narratives have produced a variety of perspectives that help to explain the past and Chile’s democratic present, rather than establishing a definitive novel of the ­dictatorship. Despite the prevalence of indirect literary representations of the past, this theme is also noticeable in ­post-­dictatorial Chilean narrative produced by those ‘defeated’ by the regime. Mainly developed by male writers such as Francisco Rivas, José Roman, Gregory Cohen, Marco Antonio de la Parra, Ramón Díaz Eterovic, Darío Oses, Radomiro Spotorno, Carlos Tromben and Guillermo Rodríguez, the ‘defeated’ forms a distinctive literary approach to the past.7 One of the elements that link these authors is their political affiliation to the left. In generational terms, these writers are heirs of the social changes implemented in Chile since the 1930s by successive Popular Front governments.8 In fact, many of them share the experience of being intellectually formed in public, pluralist and secular educational institutions that flourished in the 1950s and 1960s.9 Their literary productions are, consequently, not only critical of the coup and the military regime, but also nostalgic for Chile’s ­frente-­populista past. Cristián Opazo has described this engagement with the past as ‘historicist’. He argues that this type of representation becomes another form of pathology in Chile’s collective memory: nostalgia for a lost time of social justice and cultural change.10 Similarly, Jaime Collyer points out some of the obstacles faced by Chilean writers when political ideologies attempt to shape literary productions. This critique was not only directed at Pinochetismo, but also towards the Chilean left in g ­ eneral: La conclusión es, pues, demoledora: la izquierda y la derecha unida jamás serán vencidas. Ambas – los nuevos ‘proges’ [sic] y los fundamentalistas conservadores de siempre – buscan imponer sus procedimientos y contenidos a lo estético, ambas quieren un mensaje enaltecedor, ambas prohíben determinados hechos o subproductos estéticos antes de que ellos ­sucedan.11

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So then, our conclusion is devastating: the left and right united will never be defeated. Both [ideologies] – the new ‘progressives’ and the classic conservative fundamentalists – wanted to impose their ways on the arts, both [ideologies] wanted a glorifying message, both [ideologies] prohibit certain facts or forms of artistic expression before they even e­ xist.

In terms of narrative strategies, this nostalgic evocation of Chile and critical view of the coup draws, in a broad sense, from the social novel that flourished in the 1930s and 1940s. As Cedomil Goic states, this type of literary writing mainly produced stories to challenge the class system in the country. For this reason, it developed a politically charged discourse of exaltation of f­ rente-­populistas’ political utopias. For this generation, literature was an instrument that contributed to ­socio-­political struggles in the country.12 The influence of these authors is seen in this marginal type of ­post-­dictatorial Chilean narrative, politically affiliated to the left. Indeed, this point is confirmed by Ramón Díaz Eterovic, who describes how his novels mainly draw from two sources: the American roman noir and the social realist novel that flourished in Chile in the 1930s.13 Consequently, it is possible to detect in this particular trend of p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chilean novel an engagement with the conventions of the canonical Chilean social novel. As Opazo states, these texts are shaped by flattering portrayals of the working classes, the intertextual incorporation of social novels and the portrayal of forgotten spaces, such as tenement houses and ­working-­class ­neighbourhoods.14 In consequence, a predominantly male nostalgic perspective characterises this group of narrative representations of the past with political affiliations to the left. Naturally, academic attention has focused on the fictions of male voices, while female perspectives have enjoyed less critical evaluation. Two studies of Chilean fictions help to illustrate this point. In Eugenia Brito’s study of ­post-­coup Chilean literature published in the early 1990s, there is only one significant narrative text authored by a female writer, Diamela Eltit (although Brito also considers the poetic productions of Carmen Berenguer and Carla Grandi).15 In the new millennium, the situation has hardly shifted. Verónica Cortínez’s edited volume on p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chilean novels considers the work of four female writers – Diamela Eltit, Elena Castedo, Marcela Serrano and Pía Barros – while the majority of the text is dedicated to the work of eight male a­ uthors.16

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Accordingly, this imbalance of studies has an impact on the understanding of the past. It perpetuates a masculine perspective of past conflict, emphasising class struggle and dictatorial oppression as the main issues at stake. The particular gender experiences of women within these groups tend to be displaced from collective discourses of the past. They instead emphasise a rhetoric of heroic resistance against social injustice and political repression. Eltit and González question these masculine perspectives on the defeated when narrating the past. Either by challenging discursive strategies of the left or parodying specific literary aesthetics cultivated by male authors of leftist inclinations, both texts allow the voices of female militants or activists to emerge. This is done by representing militant women as attempting to escape the existing patriarchy of the ­anti-­Pinochet ­movements.

The gendered construction of militants and ­w ives Jamás el Fuego Nunca (2007) is set in a small room occupied by a woman and a man who are former revolutionary militants. Despite the fact that the dictatorship has long since ended, the couple remains in hiding. In this poorly furnished room, they are forced to share a single bed and endure the restrictions of an isolated life. Their tense relationship emerges through the novel in the form of arguments that the woman recalls concerning politics, radical militancy and, most significantly, the death of her child. The text ends with her getting up in the morning after a long night of insomnia. She prepares to leave the room, acknowledging that their situation cannot get ­worse. Most of the novel unravels the thought processes of the woman. Long digressions, unpredictable associations and feverish passages shape the narrative, prioritising her memories over plot and external incidents. In particular, the novel dismisses attempts to discuss the ­socio-­political conditions that led to dictatorial rule or to represent the violence of the regime in a denunciatory fashion. It is less interested in representing the past as a time of national conflict and trauma. The reader can only guess at the setting of the novel and no reference is given to real events, incidents or figures of the guerrilla groups operating under dictatorial rule. Jamás el Fuego Nunca, then, can be read as Eltit’s attempt to challenge the

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narrative conventions cultivated by authors affiliated with the ‘defeated’ through an almost hallucinatory register. In order to do this, Eltit focuses on two dimensions of the gendered reconstructions of female militants in guerrilla movements: their identities and ­bodies. From its opening pages, the novel is arranged as the psychologically disturbed monologue of the woman. She obsessively recalls different episodes of her life and meditates on a few topics: the ruined condition of her body, motherhood and radical political militancy. As the novel progresses, a hallucinatory and nightmarish register shapes the woman’s voice and recollections. For this reason, the reader struggles to establish whether the couple is alive or not. For instance, throughout the novel, the woman watches, talks and argues with spectres of dead comrades, who invade the room (instances of these moments can be found in pages 14, 43, 83, 84, 108, 109, 114, 119, 121, 136, 161 and 166). These discussions produce an image of the woman as a broken subjectivity. In addition, this surreal register opposes conventional narratives of the past, which centre on the ­socio-­political causes and consequences of dictatorial rule in Chile. In fact, the woman’s voice, which frequently digresses into memory, helps to expose her struggles with a political ideology that demands that she reformulates her identity on sociomasculine g ­ rounds. Eltit explores identity as an ‘assaulted’ category for female members of the guerrilla movements. In urban guerrilla warfare against the dictatorship, identity forgery was part of the movement’s security tactics for both men and women. Yet, Eltit emphasises the woman’s memory of such tactics as a sign of a male-­ oriented process of identity reformulation. The effects of such practices are oppressive for the main character and her s­ elf: Continuamos, en gran medida, clandestinos, nos situamos afuera, radicalmente. No contamos con nombres civiles, seguimos prendidos a nuestra última chapa, ya nos acostumbramos o nos posesionamos, no lo sé. Pero si alguien dijera mi nombre civil, no voltearía la ­cara.17 We continue, largely, in hiding, we are outsiders, in the extreme. We do not have real names, we still go by our last alias, we’ve either got used to it or we’ve made it our own, I do not know. But, if someone called out my real name I would not turn ­round.

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Her utterances in the ­third-­person plural already gives an indication of an ideology that demands the repudiation of the ‘I’ for the collective ‘We’. Nelly Richard has observed the same ideologically charged linguistic practice. Richard analysed the autobiography of Gladys Marín, former ­Secretary-­G eneral of the Chilean Communist Party and member of Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR, Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front).18 As Richard notes, Marín shapes her testimony through repeated declarations that ‘[s]olo puedo hablar en plural’,19 (‘I can only speak in the plural’) or, in a different context, ‘nosotros tenemos esas manías en las formas de expresar que, por ejemplo, nos hacen hablar de “nosotros” y nunca decir “yo”’20 (‘we have these fixations on the way we talk that, for example, make us say “We” and never “I”’). These verbal particularities, Richard concludes, give to Marín’s recollections a certain epic tone and nobility.21 The woman initially follows Marín’s linguistic model. This is reinforced by the erasure of all marks of individuality in the characters of the novel. Jamás el Fuego Nunca is structured around a variety of characters who are at first unnamed. Yet significantly, the ­woman-­narrator is the only one concerned by the implications of her status as an unnamed subject. Their nameless condition shows the radical process of militant reformulation she experiences, since the anonymous man is still in charge of this final political group. However, the woman soon contradicts what initially seems to be a constant throughout the text. In other words, she wanders between the linguistics marks that expose her ideologised subjectivity and those instances where she struggles to recover her ‘I’. Indeed, she remains nameless, but throughout the novel she is able to remember and speak out the real identities of comrades, in defiance of the man and his militant logic. The woman’s process of testifying to her traumatic past begins with remembering and enunciating the names of disappeared friends. This is also a way of recovering her dissolved ‘I’ in the left’s collective ‘We’. The woman’s use of a hallucinatory imagery and surreal register makes this process possible. This opposes Marín’s epic discourse or the realist approach to memory that critics have identified in a type of Chilean p ­ost-­ dictatorial fiction politically affiliated with the ­left. The woman’s memories also refer recursively to disciplinary operations exercised upon her body as part of her formation as a militant. Pilar Calveiro, a former Montoneros militant and

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academic, recalls the significance of such gendered operations within the context of urban guerrilla warfare in A ­ rgentina: En la militarización [de los grupos políticos] predomina una lógica masculina y las prácticas son de carácter principalmente masculino. Tienen que ver más con la fortaleza del cuerpo, el uso de la violencia y las aptitudes socialmente más desarrolladas por los v­ arones.22 In the militarisation [of political groups] masculine logic prevails and practices are also predominantly masculine in character. [These practices] are that way because of the strength of the male body, the use of violence and the more socially developed skills of ­men.

Certainly, the woman in Jamás el Fuego Nunca remembers instances when her body is remodelled for the purposes of clandestine militancy and guerrilla warfare. Her body becomes a site of discursive conflict where power is e­ nacted: Tú la odiabas, la grasa, el cuerpo graso y su brillo. Un cuerpo redondeado por capas de una grasa licuada que producía esa languidez que postergaba la agilidad, esa agilidad que tú pedías para la célula y que si no se ajustaba a tu deseo, debíamos rehacer con otros cuerpos disponibles, hambrientos y energéticos.­23 You hated it, fat, the obese body and its shiny skin. A body rolled up with layers of liquefied fat that produced a lethargy that stifled agility, the same agility that you demanded of the group and that if it did not meet your standards, we had to do it again with whatever other hungry and energetic bodies were a­ vailable.

The quotation shows the importance of the recuperation of such memories for the woman. It also localises the body as a place where the material effects of power, discourses or decisions can be seen operating. I am referring here to Foucault’s ideas about the body as one of the sites of struggle in relation to operations of power. Foucault’s ideas are productive in the present context of identity construction, since he conceives individuals not as stable subjects, but as entities that are defined as beings as a result of power operations: ‘it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals’.24 Foucault’s delineation of such power operations upon the body is analogous to the representation of the body in Jamás el Fuego N ­ unca:25 Podíamos sólo consumir lo necesario para nuestros fines. No correspondía, así lo dijiste, entregarse a la comida, hacer de ella una

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sede que terminaba por ocultar el impacto del hambre. El hambre, lo sé, tenía para ti una función. El hambre, lo pregonaste, era un estado que profundizaba el rigor y nos permitía un trabajo concreto y ­sostenido.26 We could only consume what was necessary for our ends. It was inappropriate, as you said, to give yourself up to food and turn it into a place that ends up covering up the impact of hunger. Hunger, I know, had a function for you. Hunger, you proclaimed, was a state that deepened rigour and allowed us to do a focused and sustained ­job.

The woman remembers instances when, through disciplinarian practices inflicted upon her body, she comes to be identified as a true militant in the guerrilla movement. Crucially, the female body must be shaped following a masculine model. This scene shows the construction of subjectivities through the control of bodily functions (in the above quotation, nutrition) or the sublimation of desires and emotions. What is more significant is the fact that these are practices from the past with echoes in the woman’s present. After all, as the woman claims, her aged body is still subject to the man’s disciplinary operations. Perhaps the most telling of these actions, concerns the memory of a dress in the n ­ ovel: Recuerdo que salí a la calle en un acto completamente desatinado, quebrando cualquier lógica de seguridad … Y de pronto experimenté el impacto ante ese vestido que, aunque me negué a reconocerlo, ocupó enteramente mi deseo y se apoderó de mi mente en oleadas anhelantes y secretas … Su tela, su caída, su diseño y la urgente, enloquecida necesidad de comprar el vestido, vestirme, exhibirlo en mí, comerme el vestido, devorarlo enteramente, gastar en la tela, en el diseño, en la caída, entregarme sin pudor, ajena a cualquier átomo de culpa, a un placer bacanal y absoluto con la exterioridad, la superficie más dañina en la que podía recalar mi cuerpo. Renunciar a la renuncia que hicimos en los primeros años en que nos refugiamos de una vez y para siempre detrás de un consistente ­desprecio.27 I remember I went out to the street in an act of complete foolishness, disregarding any concern for my safety … and suddenly I felt the impact of that dress that, although I refused to recognise it, completely conquered my desires and took over my mind in longing and secret waves … its fabric, its drape, its design and the urgent, maddening need to buy it, dress myself in it, show myself off in it, eat the dress up, devour it entirely, spend money on its fabric, on its

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design, on its drape, surrender unashamedly, without an atom of guilt, to an absolute bacchanalian pleasure in superficiality, the most damaging surface my body could fall into. To renounce the renunciation we made during the early years when we hid once and for all behind a consistent ­disdain.

María I. Lagos argues this episode proves the power of the man over the woman. Lagos understands this scene as a defeat for the woman, since the man’s verdict dictates her response.28 The memory of the dress shows some of the discourses through which the woman’s body and subjectivity are caught: a masculinising idea of political militancy in the past and the h ­ yper-­sexualised femininity (the dress) exploited in ­present-­day Chile. Moreover, the way in which memory functions and is exercised by the woman breaks with the tendency to narrate the trauma of the ‘defeated’ focusing on the representation of dictatorial violence and heroic resistance. The passage above discards the flattering portrayal of guerrilla warfare and social revolution. Instead, the woman’s memories become a means for repudiating a radicalised ideological discourse, exploring its consequences on female bodies and i­ dentities. Eltit, however, is not exclusively interested in challenging the militant mode of feminine embodiment to provide a ‘liberated’ image of the female body in the present. For Eltit, denunciatory and realist fictional narratives can easily adopt a linear structure, which ultimately tune themselves to dominant political discourses. Instead, she aims to subvert such gendered practices by linking narration and the body through the aesthetics of the fragment. Eltit draws on the fragment as narrative strategy to refute historical discourses that promote totalising notions of the novel as monologic. For this reason, the story is also structured around the woman’s disturbed and fissured monologue. In a recursive manner, she returns to the same fragmented themes from her past: the body, motherhood and militancy. In the case of the body, the woman focuses on specific parts or bodily functions: hunger, a hand, the eyes or, in the previous quotation, the implications of dressing up. Consequently, the body does not appear as a totality, but is itself fragmentary. The fragment becomes a narrative strategy and image to question implicit notions of the individual’s body as a totality that can be ­re-­shaped or narrated by ideology. In other words, Eltit suggests the body can be neither controlled nor liberated by ideologies or narration. What a fragmented narrative

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can do is reinforce the possibilities of resistance to ideology that certain parts or physical functions of the body can bring. Consequently, this struggle is continuous and not ­conclusive. Perhaps the most telling example of this struggle concerns their hands. Throughout the novel, the woman’s and man’s hands are sore, cramped or numb, which is a source of alarm for her: ‘Mi mano. Necesito mi mano … y, sin embargo, podría lesionarse y dejar de circular … La sangre podría interrumpir su flujo … dejarme inactiva con la mano muerta … la caída en una vida improductiva’29 (‘My hand. I need my hand … and, yet, it could get injured and stop moving … the blood could stop flowing … leaving me inactive with a dead hand … the fall in an unproductive life’). In dealing with this worrying pain, the woman expresses her dissatisfaction with her life as a general condition of fatigue and discomfort. The man’s help in easing the pain of the woman is the source of ambivalent feelings and once again prompts her anxious memories of militancy. As it is shown in the following quotation, this is the result of militancy as a permanent condition of discipline and ­oppression: Esas manos, pienso, el absurdo de unas manos unidas mientras parcialmente triunfantes, nos tomábamos de la mano ante el sonido de La Internacional, su música, su letra elocuente o convincente, una fila mítica de cuerpos exultantes y jóvenes, tan jóvenes y ya encadenados a La Internacional mientras sellábamos un imperioso compromiso con la historia y tú cantabas y yo luchaba por fijar la letra de la canción, no quería equivocarme, era peligroso, sí, cambiar una palabra o una sílaba en el interior de esa letra magna y rutilante y convertir la canción, nada menos que La Internacional, en un lastre, en un completo d ­ esastre.30 Those hands, I think, the absurdity of those hands held together while partially triumphant, we held hands to the sound of The Internationale, its music, its powerful and convincing lyrics, a mythical line of young, elated bodies, so young and bound to The Internationale while confirming an imperious commitment with history and you sang and I struggled to get the lyrics of the song right, I did not want to make a mistake, it was dangerous, yes, changing one word or one syllable of these great, sparkling lyrics and turning the song, none other than The Internationale, into a burden, into a complete d ­ isaster.

The cramped hands in the present show a powerful contrast with the fraternal hands of the past. The significance of the hand (the

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raised or clenched fist) as a political gesture has been appropriated throughout history for different purposes. Within the left, hands are metaphors for diverse ideas: the dignity of manual labour, community, solidarity and resistance are associated with the clenched fist in diverse militant images, particularly in relation to the Communist Party.31 According to Geneviève Calbris, this is due to the physical strength that the clenched fist implies and also the moral force that this gesture intimates.32 Yet, the significance of this sign is eclipsed by the woman’s episodic memory of a meaningless past, akin to a ritual. Young militant bodies gathering and singing the Internationale emerge in the woman’s memory as sacrificial victims. In her memory, they appeared chained to a supplication and to one another, forming the revered masses. That is why she remembers the fear associated with the singing of the Internationale and the possibility of changing even one syllable of the lyrics. She is anxious of altering the ‘wholeness’ of this univocal composition, which foregrounds the dogmatic nature of the party and its ideology. Through a fragmented narrative, the woman-­ narrator is keen to demonstrate how some parts of the body still show the marks of ingrained militant gendered practices. Others struggle against these practices in the present and still more have finally recovered a certain degree of autonomy. Eltit rejects any discourse that assumes the female body to be a totality that can be subjected completely to gendered political practices. At the same time, she does not propose the possibility of a total liberation of the female body from them in the present. Certain parts of the body might achieve a degree of autonomy within a context where other parts still struggle. For Eltit, the individual and textual body is not an exclusive site of disciplinarian operations or established conventions. It is fragmented into parts, in each of which it is possible to find some form of resistance. Thus, Eltit proposes a link between broken narratives, which are n ­ on-­reducible to textual closure, and the image of the militant woman as a fragmented entity in a constant state of ­reconfiguration. In the case of Libreta de Familia, the gendered processes of ­subject-­formation are also focused upon women’s social activism under dictatorial rule. Yet, a crucial difference between both novels involves their conceptualisation and use of memory. While in Eltit’s text memory becomes a useful tool for exploring the effects of oppressive practices on a woman’s identity and body,

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González’s text attenuates the use of memory to fully embrace satire. This strategy is deployed for criticising existing representations of dictatorial rule and women’s image affiliated with social activism of Christian inspiration. The novel combines two temporal frameworks to depict the story of Laura and Nicolás, a young, ­well-­off couple who marry during the military dictatorship. First, the novel sets the story in an unidentified democratic present from which Laura briefly remembers her past and marriage through a series of e­-­ mail exchanges with her expatriate best friend, Macarena. Second, the text depicts the couple’s love story, social activism and marriage under dictatorial rule. This second section comprises the majority of the novel. The story describes particular environments, spaces and characters, in a very similar way to a novel of manners. It depicts the marriage of Laura and Nicolás with a clear emphasis on their everyday problems and social rank: a ­middle-­class couple living in proletarian areas of Santiago as a result of their absolute commitment to social activism. Libreta de Familia, therefore, can be read as González’s effort to use satire to critique the conventions of bourgeois and C ­ hristian-­ inspired discourses, particularly regarding the ­ subject-­ formation of a woman within certain groups in the opposition to dictatorial ­r ule. There are particular reasons why González uses strategies from the realist novel to satirise the conventions of bourgeois discourses about women in the public sphere. González makes explicit the link between this type of fiction, a particular social class and the gendered ­subject-­formation of Laura. As Joan Oleza reminds us, the origin of the realist novel is closely linked to the emergence of bourgeoisie. The displacement of the old regime from power and the arrival of this new capitalist class necessarily produced definitive cultural changes: the emergence of a commoner state, industrial expansion, the dehumanisation of economic processes, new relationships between authors and readership and the rejection of p ­re-­ existent cultural models (Neoclassicism, Pre-­ Romanticism, Romanticism).33 In this sense, the critical approach to the practices of s­ubject-­formation of the Chilean bourgeoisie that González proposes demands the parody of literary forms linked to this g ­ roup. Through the representation of Laura’s and Nicolás’s relationship, González deploys two narrative conventions of the realist novel. The first is the representation of the interactions between

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middle- and ­working-­class life through the image of an affluent couple living in proletarian areas of Santiago. The second is the depiction of the problems of ordinary people in everyday circumstances. In this sense, Libreta de Familia recalls the writing of Alberto Blest Gana, the founder of the Chilean realist novel. His texts, widely read in schools today as part of the Chilean literary canon, often interweave the petite histoire of the main characters into the grande histoire of the country. His most important novel, Martín Rivas (1862), tells the impossible love story between the poor Martín and Leonor Encina, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, in the midst of the failed liberal revolution of 1851. This love story is an allegory of issues of social rank and the problems of class struggle in the country. Libreta de Familia explores the same themes. The representation of the encounter between the prosperous world of the bourgeoisie and the impoverished lower classes in a context of political upheaval is a conventional motif in the realist novel. This convention can be found in Blest Gana’s Martín Rivas and in Libreta de Familia. Moreover, the detailed depiction of the troubles of ordinary people is also part of the topos of realist fiction, as it exemplifies the struggles of many in the same historical context. Instances of these conventions can be equally detected in Libreta de Familia. For example, the harsh realities of political oppression, especially against the lower classes, are depicted in detail in the novel. When Laura attempts to visit her neighbours in a ­shanty-­town next to her house, she glimpses the brutality of a police raid against helpless slum-­dwellers: Las patadas y los golpes, sí los escucha. Los trastos que vuelan desde las viviendas, las frazadas gastadas, los colchones con orín, la tetera, los sartenes, el afiche del cantante, los papeles judiciales, la fotografía del papa, las camisetas del club. Siente el olor del humo de la pila de fuego que se encarga de hacer cenizas la recolección paciente de meses. Los objetos obtenidos de la caridad y del pedir, se achi­ charran en una humareda que no deje dudas, y que los deje sin nada, a ver si así aprenden, para que no se les vuelva a ocurrir venir a vivir en lo ­ajeno.34 The punches and kicks, she can hear them. The junk flying from the shacks, old blankets, p ­ iss-­stained mattresses, the kettle, the frying pans, the poster of a singer, the legal papers, the picture of the Pope, the football shirts. She smells the smoke of the bonfire that turns into ashes months’ worth of patient collection. Things obtained

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through charity and begging burned in a cloud of smoke that leaves no doubts, and leaves them with nothing, to teach them a lesson, so they never think again about coming to live where they do not ­belong.

Clearly, the deprived world of shanty towns is depicted by the squalid and wretched imagery of accumulated objects. Moreover, the brutality of dictatorial violence is explicitly represented when the raid suddenly ends in the murder of one of the s­ lum-­dwellers. Yet, the narrator does not depict the story of Laura and Nicolás in order to denounce the brutalities of the regime. Rather, the novel satirises the inclinations of wealthy couples towards social activism during dictatorial rule and the naiveté of their desire to experience life under the military regime from the perspective of the poor. In doing so, the novel also sheds light on and criticises the subject-­ formation of bourgeois women within certain ­ anti-­ Pinochet groups. Nicolás and Laura are more caricatures of committed social activists. Nicolás spends his time around the proletarian parish of his friend Osvaldo and, later, in Mapuche communities in the south of Chile. He neglects Laura, who is forced to relinquish her activist inclinations in order to perform the role of the dutiful wife and mother of their two daughters. When expressing his views on life and the situation of the country in his personal diary, Nicolás’s vocabulary becomes idealist, and draws on similar rhetorical features to those found in writings by figures such as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro.35 However, Nicolás does not spend all his time devoted to putting into practice his views on the liberation of the oppressed. He is later exposed to be romancing fellow activists (in fact, he has an affair with Laura’s best friend).36 Actually, Nicolás never attempts to meet his neighbours or visit the ­shanty-­town next to the house. Tellingly, during the police raid quoted earlier – a crucial moment where the harsh brutality of the regime literally erupts in his backyard – he is not at home. After being informed by Laura of the tragic events next to their house, he reprimands her for her involvement with the s­lum-­dwellers. Reluctantly, he informs a h ­uman-­ r ights organisation of these events and this affair is soon forgotten by the c­ ouple. Laura’s ­middle-­class social activism is also satirical. Her desire to promote social change and justice never translates into real change. She makes no real effort in this direction, despite experiencing dictatorial rule from the perspective of ‘the poor’. The only

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change in her existence has been the proletarisation of her lifestyle. Nicolás does not have a regular job and, consequently, the couple struggles to make ends meet. In fact, when meeting the ­shanty-­town dwellers for the first time, a starving Laura gladly welcomes a plate of food from their makeshift kitchen. Ironically, she becomes the recipient of charity from the people she wants to comfort. But she is unable to help them. This happens several times in the novel. Actually, during the police raid, the brutality of dictatorial violence and injustice is so overwhelming for Laura that she panics and is incapable of any kind of action. This is suggested by her position in the scene, crouched, hidden and terrified behind the wall that separates her protected world from the horror. After the raid, she crawls back to the house, cries desperately and waits for Nicolás to r­ eturn. This treatment of thematic conventions of the realist novel permits González to critique the gendered practices of ­subject-­formation amongst the Chilean bourgeoisie. Certainly, the couple actively support the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements and renounce their class privileges. Yet, the narrator informs us that they continue to perpetuate conservative images of women in politics, and, in this case, within the opposition movements. To show these practices, the text uses an omniscient narrator, a frequent device of the realist novel, to carry on with their ‘tarea civilizadora’ (‘civilising task’).37 However, this particular voice mocks the ideology of Chile’s dominant class and its practices. In fact, the narrator not only reports the events of the story, but also offers further comments on characters or events that expose, often in a jocular fashion, the gendered practices of ­subject-­formation of the ruling class. Critics have noticed, for example, González’s recurrent use of narratorial suspension. This voice often interrupts the story to address the reader: ‘¿Para qué? Se preguntará el lector’, ‘Ha de saber el lector’, ‘El lector comprenderá’38 (‘What for? The reader might ask’, ‘The reader must know’, ‘The reader understands’). Patricia Espinosa argues that, with the inclusion of these elements, ‘el estilo se ensucia’ and that this technique ‘es un error de taller [literario], que fácilmente pudo subsanarse y que demuestra una clara inseguridad narrativa’39 (‘the style is degraded … it is a mistake of literary craft, that could have been easily fixed and shows clear signs of narrative insecurity’). Yet, in a context of mockery and satire, this element appears more as a device used to comment on those

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patronising and authoritative voices (the omniscient male narrator), which dictate Laura’s subject-­formation. Moreover, the narrator’s continual representation of Laura’s innocence and submissiveness only accentuates the satirical representation of a social class and its values. As this voice informs us, Laura sees Nicolás as her ‘saviour’, almost as a prince charming ‘que llegó en el momento justo a ofrecerle una vida nueva’ (‘that arrived at the right time to offer her a new life’). For that reason, she ‘[j]amás dudaría de su amor’40 (‘[she] would never doubt his love’). For this reason, she rarely voices her doubts about Nicolás’s long absences from the household. She also hardly questions any decision made by him regarding their life as a couple or their shared political activism. This has consequences for Laura’s activist inclinations. In reality, Laura’s activism is more vicarious, than a real experience. For instance, after having her first child, she decides to go back to university. The narrator explores Laura’s thoughts regarding this decision. He uses this scene to make fun of how, for Laura, a return to university is enough to fulfil ­middle-­class activist ­principles: Habían transcurrido dos meses desde su retorno … No piense el lector que era cuestión fácil. Ni siquiera tan divertida como pareció en esa vuelta a casa de donde Macarena. Pero valió la pena … Era estimulante recorrer nuevamente los pasillos con rayados subversivos (tímidos, pero elocuentes), las salas llenas de humo, el olor a la biblioteca, la fuente de soda de la esquina donde se juntaban a tomar ­cerveza.41 Two months had passed since her return … The reader must not believe this was an easy matter. Not even as fun as it appeared when she returned home from Macarena’s place. But it was worth it … It was stimulating to walk around the halls with subversive graffiti (feeble, but telling) again, classrooms filled with cigarette smoke, the smell of the library, the bar in the corner where [students] met to drink ­beer.

Vicarious satisfaction, the narrator points out, is all Laura needs and gets from watching those corridors and halls filled with minor political graffiti. Laura feels she is part of the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements through her proximity to signs of dissidence. Crucially, such signs are located in the safety of a private university she has been allowed to attend by Nicolás for a couple of days a week. The images of classrooms filled with cigarette smoke, the library and a student

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bar reinforce the narrator’s satirical representation of Laura’s comforting idea of proper ‘activism’ under dictatorial rule: an experience more associated with inaction, silence and escapism. The scene seems to function as a caricature of ideas about social activism, which Laura employs to evade her ­middle-­class frustration and guilt. Later in this chapter, the narrator describes a scene where Laura’s ‘dissidence’ is actually performed. Again, this ‘activism’ has no real impact or influence beyond the safety of the familial home. Laura decides to tell Nicolás about one of his university lecturers, a regime supporter who, in one particular lecture, makes an apology for the dictatorship. During this ardent defence, Laura asks questions, encouraging him to speak his mind regarding ­Pinochet: Laura llegó a casa atorada por contarle a Nicolás el episodio. Era de esperar que él se enojara. La retó, que cómo se le ocurría abrir la boca, que tenía que ser invisible, que habíamos quedado en eso, etcétera y etcétera, pero finalmente no se pudo contener al ver a Laura con gestos dramáticos imitar al profe, y lloraron juntos de risa, se ­entiende.42 Laura was eager to tell Nicolás about the episode. Naturally, he would get mad. He told her off, about daring to open her mouth, and said she had to be invisible, that they had an agreement, et cetera et cetera, but in the end he could not contain himself while watching Laura’s dramatic imitation of her lecturer and they cried together with ­laughter.

In the above quotation, the narrator debunks two conservative ­middle-­class conventions that condition a woman’s identity (and activist interests) under dictatorial rule. One is the idea that women, when allowed to leave the private sphere, must remain silent and invisible in the public space. The second is the image of Laura imitating a regime advocate in order to entertain Nicolás. In other words, a husband only yields to his wife’s political action, when it is harmless or innocuous in the safety of the h ­ ome. Furthermore, the next sections of the novel are entitled and structured around the different houses Laura and Nicolás share. Each house corresponds to the narrator’s satirical treatment of Laura’s identity as a wife. To describe the first house, for example, the narrator focuses on Laura’s thoughts to show her identification with the place. Despite being a simple family home in a suburban

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area, Laura sees it more as an idyllic place with ‘un aire marino y particular’ (a special sea air) where she can perform her role of ‘esposa nueva’ (‘brand new wife’).43 Later, Laura is the one in charge of transforming a derelict house into a proper ‘home’ when they are forced to move out of the first house. This time the new home is located in a w ­ orking-­class area. Although the place is in a disastrous state, the narrator continues to focus on Laura’s thoughts to show the way in which has interiorised her role as a dutiful wife. She declares: ‘Si [Nicolás] se desvivía por encontrar algo para los dos, lo seguiría sin chistar, no le cabía duda alguna que lo que él decidía era lo mejor’44 (‘If [Nicolás] did his utmost to find something for the two of them, she would follow him without any complaint, she did not have any doubt that Nicolás’s decisions were the best ones’). The portrayal of Laura’s marriage shows the perpetuation of gendered practices of ­subject-­formation within the ­anti-­Pinochet movements. These remain, paradoxically, very similar to the ideology of the military regime. A further example of this situation involves a birthday party Laura organises towards the end of the novel. The celebration is Laura’s attempt to escape the role of wife she has been performing without complaint. Laura opens her house to receive Nicolás’s friends in an attempt to subvert the gendered order of the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements. However, the narrator quickly points out the failure of Laura’s strategy, emphasising the disjunction between her and the guests. On the night of the party, the guests invade every part of the house, leaving Laura confined to the kitchen, cooking for them. When the food is ready and Laura announces it, the narrator points out, ‘su voz fue ignorada’45 (‘her voice was not heard’). The narrator’s depiction of the party only accentuates the distance between Laura and the g ­ uests: [Laura] buscó un lugar junto a Nicolás. Pero era imposible … al otro costado Pedro gesticulaba con vehemencia discutiendo con Osvaldo. Tendría que haber hecho una extraña maniobra para encontrar lugar … Lo que habría puesto todas las miradas en lo ridículo de su actitud. Ella era la dueña de casa, era la mujer de Nicolás ¿tenía que gritar por su lugar? Estoy fuera, fue el primer pensamiento que ensombreció el semblante de L ­ aura.46 [Laura] tried to find a spot next to Nicolás. It was impossible … next to him was Pedro passionately gesticulating in conversation with Osvaldo. She would have to make an awkward manoeuvre to find a

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spot … which would have turned all eyes on her and the silliness of her attitude. She was the housewife, she was Nicolás’s partner. Did she have to scream for her place? I’m out, it was the first thought that cast a shadow over Laura’s ­face.

Laura’s desired opportunity to join the group never materialises during the party. Predictably, the guests ‘se fueron … casi todos al mismo tiempo’ (‘left … almost everyone at the same time’),47 while Nicolás remains unaware of Laura’s frustration with the evening and his neglection. In fact, after a brief argument, Nicolás goes to bed in silence and departs early in the morning to meet Osvaldo or maybe a fellow activist. Laura, the narrator points out, remains at home to ‘ordenar los restos de la fiesta’ (‘clean up the mess after the party’).48 Their marriage, as presented by the narrator, emphasises the fixed conventions of a class. This happens even though some of its members actively challenge a regime that located a very similar model of the family for the ‘reconstruction’ of the ­country.

The gendered construction of a m ­ other Motherhood is a key source of concern for the main characters in both novels. In Jamás el Fuego Nunca, the woman constantly remembers the loss of her child under the constraints imposed by clandestine operations. This event is significant since the trauma of motherhood in the novel brings discourses of radical militancy into crisis. In Libreta de Familia, Laura’s maternal role and frustrations are not remembered, so much as referred to by two voices: Laura’s own and a ­third-­person narrator. These voices foreground a satirical image of the mother. The image is meaningful, since the satire of motherhood within the Christian a­ nti-­Pinochet movements also becomes a medium for exposing its later manipulation in official memory n ­ arratives. The intersection of motherhood, memory politics and ­anti-­dictatorial movements in Latin America has created powerful images. Mothers mourning the disappearance of their children and struggling to keep their memory alive is one of them. These images are still part of p ­ ost-­dictatorial societies in the Southern Cone. Perhaps the most w ­ ell-­k nown example of these groups of women is the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) in Argentina. In Chile, the equivalent movement to the Madres in

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terms of recognition is the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Association of Family Members of the Disappeared, AFDD). The majority of the AFDD’s members are women and they have been leading the group’s activities for the last four ­decades. When comparing the Madres and the AFDD, several points in common are immediately evident: first, the heroic meaning of their fight in times of political persecution and violence; second, the individual transformation that these women experienced due to their public activism; and, third, their commitment to the memory of the disappeared.49 But, a crucial difference also emerges in relation to the way these two groups use their gendered identities as mothers. Diana Taylor has convincingly argued that the Madres’ movement did not begin when the individual mothers become acquainted in their search for their children. It originated when the women consciously decided to protest and agitate as mothers. This meant performing their individual motherhood in the public sphere in order to keep the memory of their children alive and for others to see. Motherhood performed, Taylor points out, became the embodiment of their new identity politics. In order to do this, the Madres initially modelled themselves after the image of the Virgin Mary as Mater Dolorosa.50 In contrast, the AFDD’s approach to the memory of their disappeared is rooted in political militancy. They started acting in the public sphere not as mothers, but as militant mothers, wives, partners or daughters of the disappeared. From the beginning, these women claimed that ‘las mujeres de la Agrupación eran las únicas que salían a la calle para “dar la cara” por la izquierda derrotada’51 (‘women from the Agrupación were the only ones in the streets sticking up for the defeated left’). Indeed, soon after the creation of the AFDD, its number dramatically increased by the incorporation of female members of the Chilean Communist (PC) and Socialist Party (PS). Initially, the AFDD was concerned about the situation of their relatives and the ‘¿Dónde están? Question’ was central to their demands. But the politicisation of the AFDD implied that the memory of the disappeared was later to be kept alive by emphasising other images and rhetorical strategies. In other words, the ‘¿Dónde están? Question’ was displaced by the ‘¿Quiénes eran? Question’. The answer was clear for the AFDD: committed compañeros and compañeras with the resistance, la lucha and el pueblo.52 In the AFDD, the maternal is particularly subsumed in the memory politics of

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the radical left. Between these two predominant constructions of motherhood associated with the left in the Southern Cone, both novels deploy their critique to the gendered construction of mothers in the ­anti-­Pinochet movements. The woman in Eltit’s text, for instance, testifies the consequences of experiencing an extreme and ambiguous form of motherhood in the left. In this sense, the figure of the mother in Jamás el Fuego Nunca is examined in contrast to the images constructed and associated with both the Madres in Argentina and the AFDD in C ­ hile. Similar to the ways in which maternity intersects politics in the Madres or the AFDD, motherhood is tightly linked to political militancy in Jamás el Fuego Nunca. However, the woman offers a view of this particular form of activism as highly oppressive. This critical view is suggested by the woman from the beginning the novel. In fact, the woman’s answer to the ‘¿Quiénes eran? question’ does not follow the discourse developed by, for example, the AFDD. Often, the memory of bygone compañeros and compañeras is embittered and provoking. In the opening pages, for example, the woman remembers an instance when a comrade (Martín) called her Stalinist and, later, a ‘murderer’ and ‘crazy’ in the middle of a political meeting.53 On another occasion, she recalls how another comrade (Juan) called her ‘muñeca’ (‘a doll’), in order to undermine her standing in the group and arguments in favour of armed s­ truggle.54 However, it is in relation to motherhood that the woman’s memories of militancy and the disappeared become more critical of the left’s narratives of the past. The memory of motherhood in hiding serves here to unsettle conventional images associated with the heroism and morality of those defeated by the regime. Moments where the woman remembers the agony and death of her child are connected to memories of militancy in a state of crisis and dissolution. For instance, immediately prior to one of her first memories of her child’s agony, the woman remembers the last militant group to which she belonged as shaped by precariousness, impatience and ‘un cansancio hostil que ya había invadido letalmente a nuestra célula’55 (‘a hostile fatigue that had already lethally invaded our group’). Later, again before a recollection of the child, the woman asks the man: ‘Pero ¿hubo triunfos?, te pregunto, ¿al menos una victoria?, ¿cuál célula fue exitosa o sana?, ¿en qué espacio conseguimos contribuir?’56 (‘Yet, were there any triumphs? I asked you, One victory at least? Which group was successful or healthy?

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Where did we actually make a contribution of some sort?’). Yet, perhaps the most telling example of her critique concerns the most extensive depiction of the child’s agony. This occurs in the middle of the novel. The woman connects this moment to memories of the annihilation of different groups and the actions of one particular ­comrade: el petiso Maureira, el petiso que colaboraba a diestra y siniestra con los grupos reformistas, el mismo petiso que después asomaría su rostro en la fotografía del diario y ambos cerramos los ojos conmocionados o aterrados de ver a Maureira sin su chapa, reconvertido en Javier Montes, sí, legal, orgulloso de exhibir su nombre en el periódico, el petiso que se cambió de lado, en el momento justo, cuando todavía era posible y debilitó nuestra célula sin dudar para conseguir su permanencia en una historia que, lo vemos, lo vivimos, lo padecemos, no iba a llegar a ninguna p ­ arte. 57 Little Maureira, the same one that used to collaborate left and right with reformist groups, the same one that later would show his face in the newspaper and both closed our eyes in shock or afraid of watching Maureira without his alias, becoming Javier Montes, yes, legally, proud to show his name in the newspaper, the one that changed sides, at the right moment, when it was still possible and weakened our group without doubts in order to secure his permanence in a story that we see, we live, we suffer, it was not going ­anywhere.

The woman’s memories of former groups, political decisions and old comrades often occur close to or in connection with her child and his death. This only accentuates the displacement of images associated with the heroism of a­ nti-­Pinochet militancy. Maureira’s reconversion, while morally reproachable, also suggests the kind of adaptability the couple lacked when confronted with the need to give the child proper medical treatment. The couple decides not to take the child to a hospital, letting him die in agony. They decide to do this for the sake of their own protection and the protection of other groups in hiding. In this sense, Eltit also avoids the fantasy of the naturally caring mother. The mother is not only the ultimate victim of ­male-­controlled militancy. Instead, Eltit suggests the woman’s complicity within a system of oppression of the maternal figure. In Jamás el Fuego Nunca, there is a crucial moment of tension when the woman remembers the time the man discovered that she was pregnant after his release from a detention

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centre. Significantly, the woman is vague about the origins of the child and the reader surmises that sexual abuse may have been the cause. She recalls that the man reacts with repulsion. He repeatedly asks her why she did not terminate this pregnancy: ‘por qué no te lo sacaste’58 (‘Why did you not get rid of it?’). To this, the woman answers in a defiant fashion and threatens to eject him from the room, the only secure place for him after his release from a detention centre. Maternity in both guerrilla movements and ­r ight-­w ing society is subject to the rules of masculine domination. Therefore, the woman explicitly remembers instances when the possibility of resistance is probable. Tamara Vidaurrázaga’s study of clandestine motherhood amongst members of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Movement of the Left, MIR) is helpful in clarifying this point. Vidaurrázaga proposes the concept ‘maternidades en resistencia’ (‘motherhood in defiance’) to explain the diverse strategies used by the MIR’s female militants to balance their motherhood and their activism within a highly patriarchal organisation. According to Vidaurrázaga, this concept refers to the way militant mothers reshaped their maternal roles to facilitate their political activism within the radical left. First, they embraced both the ‘nurturing’ aspect of maternity and the ‘destructive’ power of guerrilla fighting; second, they transformed their love for their individual children into a collective and abstract love towards all the dispossessed children in society; third, they transformed their children into ideals for freedom and justice in a democratic future; fourth, they implemented diverse strategies to close the distance between them and their children; and, finally, they transformed maternity into a collective experience.59 In short, what the women interviewed by Vidaurrázaga reveal is their desire to be mothers in conventional terms, while remaining committed militants. The concept of ‘motherhood in defiance’ is problematic, since it does not challenge conventional gendered assumptions associated with both militancy and motherhood. It also embraces fixed notions of women’s roles as militants and mothers. In contrast to the balanced militancy and motherhood constructed in the narratives of the past in Vidaurrázaga’s study, the novel soon complicates its very possibility. The nurturing side of motherhood in Jamás el Fuego Nunca soon dissolves due to the death of the child. What surfaces is a more ambiguous image of the mother. This ambiguity gives the novel its disruptive power. It defies the specific

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memories and gendered models of the militant left in the heroic narrative of the fight against dictatorial oppression. The nuanced condition of motherhood that Eltit’s novel foregrounds is suggested through the woman’s own words in her endless night of insomnia and ­anxiety: Somos, así lo pactamos, una célula … Lo hicimos después que se hubo de consumar la muerte … porque era una muerte que nos competía y nos desgarraba. No lo llevamos al hospital, no parecía posible. Mis súplicas, lo sé, eran una mera retórica, una forma de disculpa o de evasión. No podíamos acudir con su cuerpo mermado y agónico, acezante y agónico, macilento y agónico, amado y agónico, al hospital, porque si lo hacíamos, si trasladábamos su agonía, si la desplazábamos de la cama, poníamos en riesgo la totalidad de las células porque caería nuestra célula y una estela destructiva iría exterminando el amenazado, disminuido campo m ­ ilitante.60 We are, as we agreed, a cell … We did it after his death … because it was a death that involved us and devastated us. We did not take him to the hospital, it did not seem possible. My prayers, I know, were pure rhetoric, a way of apology or evasion. We could not go with his weak and agonizing body, panting and agonizing, gaunt and agonizing, loved and agonizing, to the hospital, because if we did, if we moved his agony, if we took it from the bed, we would have endangered all the cells because our cell would have collapsed and a destructive trail would have exterminated the, diminished, ­under-­t hreat ­militants.

The woman’s contribution to the death of her child is evident here. Despite the couple’s efforts to care for him during his agony, her decision to let him die in order to protect other groups in hiding disrupts the myth of the caring mother. The recognition of the true meaning of her prayers as pure rhetoric, a form of exculpation, opens the figure of the mother up to a new interpretation. When this woman remembers, images such as those of the mater dolorosa, embodied by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, are discarded. Similarly, the memory model of the AFDD rooted in a notion of militant motherhood is not possible. The ‘¿Dónde están? Question’ and the ‘¿Quiénes eran? Question’ are redundant for this woman, since she already knows her child’s ultimate d ­ estiny. Conversely, Libreta de Familia depicts motherhood in a very different fashion to Jamás el Fuego Nunca. In González’s text, the stereotypical representation of the mother and machismo culture

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allows her to challenge gendered identities associated with an emblematic memory in Chile. This memory narrative is linked to the years of redemocratisation in the country, following the 1988 national referendum that put an end to Pinochet’s regime. This process was led in its first decade by two Christian Democrat presidents and under the strong influence of the Chilean Catholic Church. As Martín Hopenhayn highlighted in the early transition, political life was heavily influenced by the Catholic Church. The Chilean secular state fades in a context where citizens must hear and interiorise pastoral opinions emanating from the highest religious authorities.61 Consequently, a conservative idea of the family and the revered image of the mother as the fulcrum for this sacred institution were continuously mobilised during the period. In doing so, the State aimed to confirm traditional cultural norms and political ends aligned with such values. As Nelly Richard states, ‘the government of the democratic transition needed to hyperbolise the discourse of the family to forge new links of community stability that would be responsible for naturalizing the reencounter of the country with itself’,62 in the aftermath of v­ iolence. In this context, the satirical representation of Laura as embodiment of the ultimate mother is best grasped with recourse to Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex. Her discussion of the married woman and mother is useful in the analysis of Libreta de Familia. The novel exposes the situation of Laura within the constraints of an unhappy marriage and a lonely maternity. The main source of frustration for Laura are issues of motherhood, the family and de facto inequalities, topics discussed by Beauvoir in her study. Indeed, Laura embodies many characteristics Beauvoir explores in relation to the oppression of women in the ­mid-­t wentieth century. Also, Laura’s situation, although satirically depicted, echoes the situation of women in Chilean society at the time. This fact emerges in the memories of many Chilean women exiled in Europe during the 1970s and early 1980s. In exile, they discovered the gap between the situation of women in Chile and in countries such as France, Belgium or Italy. The palpable emancipation of European women surprised them, in particular regarding reproductive rights, cultural dynamics and sexuality.63 By contrast, as Julieta Kirkwood describes in 1986 (precisely around the time in which Libreta de Familia is set), the situation in Chile was very ­different:

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En Chile, el Movimiento Feminista es apenas emergente y no ha tenido aún el tiempo de teorizar, en el sentido de dar coherencia a los principios y problemas expuestos por las mujeres en su actividad práctica. Tampoco ha tenido el tiempo de elaborar estrategias en torno al problema de la autonomía, de la doble militancia, de la forma de insertarse en el campo político, de cómo iniciar una praxis pública. El momento es delicado porque en él se está resolviendo el futuro, y éste dependerá absolutamente de cómo se resuelva la cuestión entre la lógica patriarcal y la lógica de c­ lases.64 In Chile, the feminist movement is barely emerging and it has not had time to theorise, in the sense of giving coherence to the principles and problems exposed by women in their daily lives. It has not had time either to plan strategies regarding the issue of autonomy, of double militancy, of how to be involved in politics, of how to start a public [feminist] praxis. The moment is sensitive because it is now that the future is being resolved, and the future will absolutely rely on how the issue is resolved between patriarchal and class l­ ogic.

In short, these exiled Chilean women realised that debates around issues of sexuality, family, the workplace or reproductive rights in the country were decades behind Europe. In this sense, it can be inferred that the situation of women in Chile in the 1980s was similar to the one depicted by Beauvoir in 1940s and 1950s Europe. In her study, she argues about the risks of understanding maternity as a condition that ‘is enough in all cases to crown a woman’s life’.65 Motherhood, Beauvoir argues, takes form within the totality of a woman’s life. This means it impacts her relationship with her husband, her past, her occupation and herself. Consequently, when maternity is experienced within the constraints of an unhappy marriage, a traumatic past, unfulfilling occupations or an unstable self, it becomes a burden. Motherhood is only significant, she claims, when the mother can also actively play a part in economic, political and social life. The myth of exclusive belonging between mother and child is the main preconception that hinders her real introduction into the public sphere. This idea dictates the mother’s exclusive care, education and custody of the child. The modern Western woman struggles, Beauvoir finally points out, within her exclusive identification as a pure generality: the housekeeper, the wife, the mother.66 In the novel, Chile’s cultural patriarchalism and Pinochet’s authoritarian government set up particular conditions for the oppression of women. Laura’s almost

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total embodiment of the devoted mother exposes her particular gendered identity linked to an emblematic memory of ­post-­dictatorial Chile. This is noticeable both in Laura’s epistolary exchanges and her depiction by the n ­ arrator. In her correspondence, Laura appears to embody a conservative image of the maternal in ­post-­dictatorial Chile. Significantly, there is not one single mention of other aspects of Laura’s life as a woman or a professional. This suggests her total devotion to motherhood. In addition, the very act of recollection seems only to be prompted when, as Laura declares, ‘los hijos … se van’67 (children … fly the nest). Laura appears, in a Beauvoirian fashion, as pure generality: the mother. This is reinforced by the significance for Laura of the forthcoming wedding of one of her daughters, Manuela. She constantly mentions this event to Macarena in her e­ -­mails. Since Manuela’s wedding is going to be consecrated by the Catholic Church, Laura celebrates the perpetuation of a conservative ideology, in accordance with her role as mother. This is also possible since, to Laura’s satisfaction, Manuela and her fiancé ‘viven hace dos años juntos … pero bien programados, los dos están recibidos y trabajando’68 (live together for two years now … but well organised, both are professionals and working’). Indeed, certain associations attach themselves to Laura’s use of the phrase ‘bien programados’ (‘well organised’). This is a subtle way of alluding to the fact the couple do not have children already. Despite their ‘cohabitation’, the couple is presented as an example of a sanctioned model of family in a slightly tolerant ­post-­dictatorial Chile. Laura certainly approves this model for her daughter, but still deeply rooted in conservative ­values. In addition, Laura’s maternal s­ elf-­representation alternates with another way in which her motherhood is depicted: via a t­ hird-­person omniscient narrator. This has consequences for gender and memory in the text, since this narrative mode divests Laura of her voice and presents her as a caricature. It is important to consider here the way in which the narrator introduces Laura in the n ­ ovel: Si Nicolás no hubiese aparecido en mi vida, quién sabe qué hubiese sido de mí, había pensado Laura dentro de la habitación del cura. Sí, Nicolás era el salvador, el que había detenido su mirada para fijarse en ella y se había quedado, ofreciéndole un futuro lleno de desafíos, de planes universales, de aquellos que escapaban de los muros de su casa paterna, que volaban más allá de su habitación y de un hogar

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gastado por las discusiones familiares por una infancia solitaria y una adolescencia incómoda para su madre …­69 If Nicolás had not appeared in my life, who knows what would have become of me, Laura thought in the priest’s room. Yes, Nicolás was the saviour, the one who stopped to look at her and who has stayed, offering her a future full of challenges, of universal plans, the ones that jumped over the walls of the paternal home, that flew beyond her bedroom and a household worn out by domestic arguments, by a lonely childhood and an awkward puberty for her mother …

The satirical image of Laura as the ‘young girl’ is better grasped if compared to Beauvoir’s description of the situation of a young girl in terms of her f­ uture: There is unanimous agreement that getting a husband – or in some cases a ‘protector’ – is for her the most important of undertakings. In her eyes man incarnates the Other, as she does for the man; but this Other seems to her to be on the plane of the essential, and with reference to him she sees herself as the inessential. She will free herself from the parental home, from her mother’s hold, she will open up her future, not by active conquest but by delivering herself up, passive and docile, into the hands of a new m ­ aster.70

Moreover, as the devoted wife of a social activist, Laura understands the resistance to the military regime in a particular way. This memory emphasises the total and unconditional service and sacrifice of its members for the marginalised in the shanty towns throughout the country. This vision of the past implies clear boundaries between good and evil, justice and oppression, victims and torturers. But also, within this narrative there is an implicit discourse of gender roles for women: dutiful wives and selfless mothers in the household. This image of the maternal figure is far from the way other women used motherhood during the dictatorship. As Olga Grau explains, many mothers seized ‘el espacio citadino [e] interpela[ron] al orden político instaurado en la muerte, cuestionándolo, precisamente, por la transgresión del orden legitimado en la vida que representaba la mater’71 (‘the space of the city and challenged political order based on death, questioning it, precisely, due to its transgression of the legalised order of life that the mother represented’). It is precisely Laura as pure generality, the wife and the mother, that the narrator aims to satirise, as is depicted in the following q ­ uotation:

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Su papel de madre primeriza la hizo olvidarse del mundo exterior y respirar según el horario de Manuela. En la inexperiencia, se exigía una dedicación minuciosa, ocupando gran parte de las horas del día y de la noche … Dejó de lado cualquier distracción del exterior, y la casa del pasaje se convirtió en escuela de puericultura y en monasterio de voto de s­ ilencio.72 Her role as fi ­ rst-­t ime mother made her forget the outside world and breath according to Manuela’s routine. Due to inexperience, she imposed on herself a painstaking dedication, taking up a large part of the day and night … She ignored any external distraction, and the house turned into a school of childcare and a silent ­monastery.

By openly mocking Laura’s motherhood (the association between the maternal, schools and nunneries), the narrator is underlying the maternal role as a ‘staged’ category. It is a role that Laura naturally performs not only under dictatorial rule or in the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements, but also in the aftermath of conflict. The notion of playing prescribed roles is crucial in Libreta de Familia. It is the source of its critique of Laura’s gendered construction as a mother. Yet, this line of criticism also extends to other characters. The novel is full of figures who act out specific roles in dictatorial Chile. For instance, Nicolás embodies the revolutionary of bourgeois origins and Osvaldo dies as a martyr ­‘cura-­obrero’ murdered by the regime. The narrator by mocking Laura’s motherhood as it is framed by the ­anti-­Pinochet movements of Christian inspiration exposes her identity construction. This is necessary, since the emblematic memory that Libreta de Familia is attempting to undermine (Chile as a reconciled family where the maternal figure is its moral pillar) provides just such construction and remains one of several mechanisms that perpetuates its power in p ­ ost-­dictatorial ­Chile. This chapter has foregrounded the extent to which the memory discourses of the a­ nti-­Pinochet movements are criticised as patriarchal constructs in both novels. They depart from the nostalgic perspectives and realist techniques used by previous and often male authors traditionally affiliated with the left. Eltit uses a hallucinatory tone to explore the impact of radical ideologies on the bodies and identities of female militants. Instead, González uses satire to critique the s­ubject-­ formation of women in the ­anti-­Pinochet movements of Christian inspiration. Eltit’s Jamás el Fuego Nunca addresses the oppressive practices of militancy exerted

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upon women and attempts to challenge these practices through a fragmentary aesthetics. The text, it is argued, finds moments where the narratives of the left break down in a fragmentary rejection of totalising discourse. It also explores the complicity of female militants in the propagation or perpetuation of such strategies in the present. This tension reaches its maximum expression when addressing the issue of motherhood in the novel. In contrast to existing images of mothers searching for the disappeared, Eltit also displaces traditional images of heroism, stoicism and commitment of maternal figures. In this way, the novel highlights how leftist mothers can also be shaped by complicity, guilt and rage. Through satire, Libreta de Familia aims to expose the conventions of ­subject-­formation that affected ­middle-­class women with activist inclinations and ­anti-­Pinochet convictions. In doing so, it attempts to foreground the same values and norms that shape a particular representation of the traumatic past. As in Jamás el Fuego Nunca, the representation of motherhood helps to expose one of the dominant discourses in democratic Chile. This is the idea of the country as a reconciled family and the maternal figure as the moral pillar of this institution. In the next chapter, the examination of the gendered role of women in the image of the reconciled Chilean family will be advanced, focusing on another central figure of the memory struggle in the country: the female collaborator.

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Chapter ­3

Female Collaboration in Carne de Perra and La Vida ­Doble

On a bright and crisp morning in May 2017, a loud group of around thirty people marched from Santiago’s oldest cemetery to a house nearby. Before departing, a few words were spoken by a couple of participants. They were in front of the Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido y del Ejecutado Político (Memorial for the Disappeared and Executed) and red carnations were handed out among the partakers. The group walked less than 10 minutes. They carried black and white posters with the clear face of a woman and banners with her name written in massive red and black fonts. In front of a yellow terraced house, the group stopped and a funa unfolded. Posters with the photo, name, address and ID number of Luz Arce Sandoval were attached to her house, and flyers were distributed by the demonstrators among ­passers-­by. Then, they started reading out loud a short speech denouncing Arce’s collaboration with the military regime between 1975 and 1979. For several minutes, the only sound that could be heard in the area was the defiant voices of the protesters singing: ‘olé olé olé olá / como a los nazis / les va a pasar / a donde vayan / los iremos a funar’ (‘olé olé olé ola / it is going to happen to you / like the Nazis / wherever you go / we will shame you’). After this, the funa ended with an even louder call: ‘si no hay justicia, hay funa’ (‘if there is not justice, there is funa’). Luz Arce, presumably living in Mexico since 2000, had returned to Chile to live a quiet life in legal and social impunity. Thanks to the work of the Comisión Funa (Funa Comission), Arce was tracked down and her anonymity was exposed through

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this new form of political demonstration ­t wenty-­seven years after the return to democracy in C ­ hile. This chapter discusses the gendered memory discourses of the Chilean democratic transition from the perspective of one of its most ambiguous and elusive representatives: the female collaborator. My discussion will focus on the fictive memories of María Rosa in Fátima Sime’s Carne de Perra (2009)1 and of Irene/Lorena in Arturo Fontaine’s ­award-­w inning novel La Vida Doble (2010).2 Carne de Perra tells the story of María Rosa. She is involved in the assassination of a politician during Pinochet’s regime and the death of her former torturer and lover, Emilio Krank. La Vida Doble relates the confession of Irene/Lorena. She is a former guerrilla fighter and later collaborator who tells her life story to a silent interviewer, interested in writing about her betrayal of former comrades and ­friends. Despite their fictional nature, these novels have been commonly read by critics as realist portrayals of the horrors of dictatorial rule and its practices.3 Cristián Montes, for instance, argues that a novel such as Carne de Perra ‘entra en consonancia con la urgencia por procesar constructivamente el pasado, revitalizar la memoria, conocer definitivamente la verdad de lo sucedido y poder realizar así, por fin, el duelo necesario’4 (‘is in keeping with the urgency to constructively deal with the past, refresh the memory, know once and for all the truth of what happened and finally, be able to mourn properly’). Daniuska González agrees and concludes that Sime’s novel effectively ‘compendia la abyección, la violencia política, el paroxismo del horror – horror tanto colectivo como individual – la degradación’5 (‘condenses the abjection, the political violence, the culmination of the horror – collective and individual – the humiliation’). In the case of Arturo Fontaine, since his first novel, Oír su Voz (1992), he has shown an interest in Chile’s dictatorial past. His works deploy narrative strategies that can be described as realist, relying on w ­ ell-­researched descriptions of different social classes and historical events.6 Carlos Franz emphasises that Fontaine’s La Vida Doble ‘está basada en una minuciosa investigación’ (‘is based upon meticulous research’).7 This prompts Ricardo Leiva to claim that the text is characterised by an effective realism. The reader, he argues, forgets he or she is reading a novel written, at the time of its publication, by the director of the most influential liberal think-­ ­ t ank in Chile, the Centro de Estudios Públicos (Public Studies Centre, CEP):

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Hay que tener estómago para sortear esas páginas, en las que corre sangre, muerte, dolor, odio, miedo, vergüenza. No hay salida posible. No basta el recurso escapista de cerrar el libro y repetirse que sólo se trata de una ficción … No tenemos esa coartada porque sabemos que todo eso pasó en Chile … Aquello está documentado y Fontaine expone las numerosas fuentes bibliográficas y las entrevistas que son la base de su investigación. Su historia abruma porque fue ­real.8 It is necessary to have a strong stomach to go through these pages, where blood, death, pain, hate, fear and shame gush. There is no way out. It is not enough to close the book and say it is just fiction … We do not have such alibis because we know all of it really happened in Chile … Such things are well documented and Fontaine references the variety of bibliographical sources and interviews that are the base of his research. His story overwhelms because it was r­ eal.

More recently, other critics have pointed out elements in these texts that do not belong to realism and seem more typical of experimental fiction associated with the literary a­ vant-­garde movement in Latin America. Catalina Olea’s analysis of Carne de Perra, for instance, demonstrates how Sime combines diverse genres such as testimonio, children’s literature and melodrama.9 In the case of La Vida Doble, Mario Lillo argues that Fontaine’s novel belongs to the paradigm of the H ­ ispano-­A merican novel of superrealismo.10 This type of fiction was cultivated in Chile in the mid-1930s and rejected most of the narrative conventions of ­nineteenth-­century literary Realism.11 In a number of articles, Jaume Peris has also discussed Fontaine’s narrative play with his authorial figure in La Vida Doble, bringing the novel close to a form of postmodernist fi ­ ction.12 Like those of Olea and Peris, this analysis of Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble focuses on narrative strategies that are not usually considered realist. For this reason, this chapter analyses the use of metafictional strategies in Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble. Our understanding of metafiction is informed by Patricia Waugh who defines it as: ‘fictional writing which ­self-­consciously and systematically calls attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’.13 This chapter argues that both novels use this type of fictional writing to challenge the gendered politics of memory put forward by the ruling Concertación coalition between 1990 and 2010.14 Ronit Lentin uses the expression ‘gendered politics of memory’ to signify how ‘[o]nce communicated, women’s … memories are often

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c­o-­opted, nationalised, taken away, serving the purpose of the (patriarchal) collective’.15 In Chile, two brief examples help to confirm Lentin’s claim. During President Patricio Aylwin’s inauguration ceremony (incidentally, the leader of the Chilean Christian Democratic Party), women played a highly gendered role in relation to the memory of the traumatic past. In an event with marked ritualistic, almost sacramental overtones, the wives of many disappeared performed Chile’s national dance: the cueca. But they did it alone, as a way of marking the absence of their husbands and their participation in the reconciliation of the national family.16 The second example refers to the reactions that emerged after the publication of the report of the Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Chilean National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture) in 2004. The Agrupación de Mujeres ­Ex-­Prisioneras Políticas (Women’s Association of Former Political Prisoners) rejected the report’s claims specifically regarding the explanation given for the unleashing of political violence against Chilean ­women: Para nosotras, el discurso presidencial desarrolla una profunda contradicción, entre lo que reconoce que ocurrió y las medidas que propone como reparación. Destaca que las mujeres sufrimos torturas físicas y psicológicas como todos … Sin embargo, a esta violencia de género, que no supone ninguna reparación paliativa, el discurso suma discriminaciones inexplicables. Las mujeres militantes y resis­ tentes no aceptamos ser tratadas en nuestro compromiso político como ‘las mujeres o esposas de …’ Sufrimos la tortura independientemente de ser solteras o casadas con militantes. Por tanto, no puede ser confundida o restada la reparación por un asesinato o desaparición del cónyuge, de la reparación que un familiar amerita por haber sido individualmente víctima de la ­tortura.17 For us, the discourse of the President exposes a deep contradiction between what he recognises did happen and measures he proposes as reparation. He highlights women endured physical and psychological torture like everybody else … However, to this gendered violence, that does not imply any form of palliative reparation, his address also includes incomprehensible discriminations. We militant and resilient women, as committed political activists, do not accept being treated as ‘partners or wives of …’ We endured torture regardless of being single or married to militant men. Therefore, reparations for the murder or disappearance of a husband should not be mixed up with or detract from the reparations a relative deserves for being a victim of torture ­t hemselves.

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Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble call into question these gendered images. They disturb the production and perpetuation of such memory narratives in relation to women’s role in them. In particular, the texts show the accumulated dissatisfaction of the electorate towards the Concertación coalition and its gendered politics of memory. This frustration reached its peak during Michelle Bachelet’s first administration (2006–10), coincidentally also the last government of this ruling coalition of p ­ arties. In this sense, a reading of both novels in terms of the gendered politics of memory of the Concertación coalition demands further explanation. The memorial practices of the coalition aimed to produce a national discourse mainly shaped around two tropes: political consensus and national reconciliation. Different strategies were implemented in order to craft Chile’s official memory. The first of these tactics, according to Nelly Richard, demanded the active production and promotion in the public sphere of appeasing narratives. The goal of these discourses was simple, yet crucial: to protect Chile’s fragile democracy – with Pinochet still as Commander-­ ­ in-­ Chief of the Armed Forces. Another serious concern was the confrontational way of doing politics led by disgruntled organisations demanding actual truth and justice about human rights violations.18 The second of these tactics, according to Carlos Ruiz, was designed by a mixture of politicians and technocrats ideologically affiliated to the Chilean Christian Democratic Party (PDC).19 Therefore, the Chilean transition and its politics of memory are ‘gendered’ insomuch as the Church and Catholic traditionalism played a crucial role in shaping the new national pact of peaceful coexistence. This situation affected the social and cultural functions assigned to women in the aftermath of violence.20 It is not coincidental that the cabinet of Christian Democrat President Patricio Aylwin (1990–4), as Susan Franceschet points out, was comprised of ­twenty-­six male ministers and only one woman.21 Similar gender imbalance was noticeable in the composition of President Aylwin’s Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with seven male members (one of them an influential former minister of Pinochet’s regime) and only two women (one of them also a Christian Democrat). In this scenario, women’s memories were promoted by male political elites in the public sphere, emphasising their contribution to the reconciliation of the national family due to their ‘natural’ nurturing

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qualities. As President Aylwin stated in his historic inaugural address in March 1990: ‘Yo tengo fe. Tengo mucha fe en Chile y en su gente, en la abnegación, sensatez y fortaleza ejemplares de la mujer chilena … en los valores morales de nuestras familias’22 (‘I have faith. I have plenty of faith in Chile and its people, in the exemplary abnegation, sense and fortitude of Chilean women … in the moral values of our families’). The fact that Sime and Fontaine prioritise the representation of the dictatorship and transition with recourse to metafictional devices, brings these novels close to Linda Hutcheon’s notion of historiographical metafiction. This is a type of literary writing that depicts the past, according to Hutcheon, in order to underscore the strategies of representation that produce histories.23 Historio­ graphical metafictions such as Carne de Perra or La Vida Doble are particularly useful in challenging the gendered politics of memory of the transition since both texts stress that the conventional production of such interpretations of the past does not bear witness to the perspectives, as Hutcheon clarifies, of ‘previously “silent” groups defined by differences of race, gender, sexual preferences, ethnicity, native status, [and] class’.24 Therefore, metafictional devices such as intertextuality, ­self-­reflexivity and mimicry are frequent strategies in this type of fiction. Through mimicry, conventions of collective discourses are ­re-­enacted or repeated, but with a critical difference (for example, the image of the reconciled Chilean family that ultimately appears as a social group of conflicts and repressions). It is through metafictional questioning that Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble attempt to displace existing memory discourses. They uncover the conventions and gendered assumptions of their production. Ultimately, this approach is also useful in departing from the dominant ways in which these novels have been read by critics, that is as realist texts of the horror of the recent ­past. In order to characterise the politics of memory of the Concertación coalition, a brief discussion of Michelle Bachelet’s first presidential term (2006–10) will precede the analysis of both texts. This section will explain how Bachelet’s administration, widely regarded as one of the most proactive governments in terms of memory politics, ended up perpetuating the gendered memorial conventions of the Concertación coalition. These are the same conventions that Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble challenge via their use of m ­ etafiction.

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The Bachelet ­government Bachelet took office in March 2006 after winning the January ­r un-­off against ­r ight-­w ing candidate Sebastián Piñera with 54 per cent of the vote. After this solid victory, expectations were high in terms of reforms of gender issues in the country and the politics of memory. What the electorate saw in Bachelet was the embodiment of s­ ocio-­cultural change. She would reshape traditional values and politics in the country. Part of Bachelet’s appeal as a politician from the Concertación coalition came from her commitment to the memory of human rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile. Indeed, Bachelet embodied the memory question in a fashion unlike any of her predecessors. After the 1973 coup, she was a political prisoner before going into exile in Australia and East Germany. She was also the daughter of air force general Alberto Bachelet. He died at the Academia de Guerra Aérea (Aerial War Academy) from cardiac complications after enduring months of imprisonment and torture in 1974. In this sense, Bachelet is part of Chile’s ‘wounded family’. This term is borrowed from Cecilia Sosa to describe the bloodline assembly of relatives and victims of political violence searching for truth and justice in the aftermath of violence in Argentina, but which is equally applicable to other Latin American countries.25 Bachelet’s lifestyle, political career and status as victim of political violence represented a threat to the r­ ight-­w ing establishment. She was a woman, single mother of three children, committed feminist and agnostic, who promised a more participatory and c­ itizen-­driven political style.26 In her presidential campaign, for instance, Bachelet frequently pointed out the relative lack of gender improvement achieved by women since the return to democracy. She promised gender parity in her cabinet, gender quotas in politics, support for women’s incorporation into the workforce, attention to the problem of violence against women, among other issues.27 This ­gender-­oriented agenda clearly had an impact on female voters, who traditionally favoured conservative presidential candidates. In the January r­ un-­off, the gender gap between voters disappeared when 53.5 per cent of women cast their ballot for her, an almost identical figure to her support from male voters (53.6 per cent).­28 Bachelet’s first government was also framed by crucial memory struggles. Two events are worth highlighting. They bracket the period of her administration and symbolise Bachelet’s relationship

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with the traumatic past from the perspective of a former political prisoner and as the first woman president in the history of the country. Only a few months after she took office, General Pinochet suffered a heart attack and died days later at the Hospital Militar (Military Hospital) in December 2006. This event became another example of what Alexander Wilde labelled Chile’s ‘irruptions of memory’, public events that emerged in the country’s national consciousness to evoke images, figures and causes associated with a political past still present and experienced by the Chilean population.29 Pinochet’s death polarised the country in much the same way as in the last months of Allende’s administration and during the dictatorship. From the moment of his hospitalisation, Bachelet’s cabinet started discussing Pinochet’s health problems as those of a 91-­year-­old man. A major concern was whether the government’s position regarding his public funeral should emphasise his position as former president, ­senator-­for-­life or former commander-­ in-­chief of the Chilean Army. Pinochet’s death became Bachelet’s first public engagement with a traumatic past she had experienced with thousands of victims of human rights violations and their ­relatives. Her government opted for the consensual logic of the coalition. Torn between conflicting desires not to offend either the general’s supporters or relatives of his victims, Bachelet’s administration projected signs of uncertainty and hesitation regarding Pinochet’s public interment. After a m ­ uch-­delayed decision, Bachelet did not declare a state funeral for Pinochet as former president. Instead, her ruling treated him as a former c­ommander-­ in-­ chief. This enraged both Pinochet’s supporters and relatives of Allende’s former c­ ommander-­in-­chief General Carlos Prats, assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1974 by agents of Pinochet’s secret police. Bachelet also conveniently kept her distance from the ceremonies at the Escuela Militar (Military Academy) in Santiago. This decision became the first compromise in Bachelet’s image as Head of State and her promised c­ itizen-­driven political style. This was frustrating for the general public, since just months before she mobilised her gender as a guarantee for definite change in a wide range of issues, among them human rights. In her inaugural address, Bachelet firmly declared: ‘Estableceremos un diálogo basado en la franqueza y la participación. Un gran pacto entre la ciudadanía y sus gobernantes. Ustedes lo saben, yo cumplo mis compromisos. Diré

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lo que pienso y haré lo que digo. ¡Palabra de mujer!’30 (‘We will establish a dialogue based on frankness and participation. A grand pact between citizens and government. As you know, I honour my commitments. I will say what I think and do what I say. Take my word for it!’). Yet, the first woman president was unable to break free from the consensual and highly gendered political logic designed by her p ­ redecessors. The second event was the creation of a new memorial site for the victims of Pinochet’s regime. Bachelet’s first term in office symbolically ended with the inauguration of the Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos (Museum of Memory and Human Rights). It was built in order to encourage respect for human rights as a permanent practice in the country.31 The museum was persistently presented by the press as an especially emblematic project of Bachelet’s momentous administration, since she was herself the victim of human rights violations. It was described as the defining work of her historic presidency. Signs of a new approach to the traumatic past in the design of the museum again created great expectations. Bachelet appointed Marcia Scantlebury, also a victim of human rights violations at Villa Grimaldi, as the head of the project. Moreover, in the months prior to the inauguration, Scantlebury repeatedly declared to the press Bachelet’s special understanding of human rights abuses: ‘Este museo se construye porque tenemos una presidenta – también víctima de violación a los derechos humanos- con una gran sensibilidad sobre este tema’32 (‘This museum is being built because we have a female President – also victim of human rights violations – who is highly sensitive to this issue’). Yet, the government’s insistence in presenting the museum as the great work of Bachelet had later consequences for women in the official memory discourses in the country. Before taking office as president, she had worked as Minister of Defence in President Lagos’s administration, a symbolic post for someone who survived repeated abuse by military personnel. Commenting on such a situation, she declared during her ­campaign: Ver que una persona con mi historia pueda incluso trabajar en un área como Defensa y hacerlo en función del país y no en función de sus propios amores, desamores, odios, venganzas o lo que sea, es algo que yo he pesquisado mucho, la gente me dice ‘usted supo perdonar y por lo tanto va a saber gobernar bien’ … Soy como la niña símbolo … en Derechos Humanos, porque yo como ministra de Defensa me puse ese ­objetivo.33

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Seeing that a person with my history can work in an area like defence and do it for the country and not motivated by her own, likes and dislikes, hate, revenge or any other reason, it is something that I have given lots of thought to, people tell me ‘you knew how to forgive and therefore you will know how to lead well’ … I’m like the poster girl … for Human Rights, because as Minister of Defence I set myself that ­objective.

The museum was presented mainly as the project of Michelle Bachelet, the politician of the Concertación coalition rather than the member of Sosa’s ‘wounded family’. Her presidential figure embodied the discourse of reconciliation and the museum was the culmination of such intentions. For this reason, Bachelet adopted the official rhetoric of the coalition to describe the museum’s aims. She declared during its inauguration: ‘[el museo] hace más fuerte que nunca en la conciencia de todos el compromiso con la libertad y la democracia, el compromiso con el “nunca más”’34 (‘[the museum] makes the commitment to freedom and democracy stronger than ever in everyone’s mind, the commitment to “never again”’). Crucially, the visibility of the gendered dimension of the memory struggle was diluted in the museum. When mentioning the different actors involved in the fight for human rights in Chile during the museum’s inauguration, Bachelet used the masculine ‘neutral’ in her speech. She thanked ‘los familiares de las víctimas’ and made a special mention to ‘… los juristas … los periodistas … los asistentes sociales, a las organizaciones no gubernamentales religiosas y laicas, a los representantes de los países amigos …’ (‘the relatives of victims … the lawyers, the journalists … the social workers, the religious and secular NGOs, the representatives of friendly countries …’) who fought for truth and justice in the country.35 The omission of women is difficult to ignore in Bachelet’s speech, especially when the most important group in Chile, the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Association of Family Members of the Disappeared, AFDD), has been almost exclusively made up of women.36 In this sense, the grammatical use of the masculine (‘los’) betrays the coalition’s tendency to place the feminine in the background of Chile’s official memory narratives. Bachelet closed two decades of Concertación administrations by repeating the discourses of the coalition that marginalised women’s voices in the official

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interpretation of the past. Ultimately, her image as the embodiment of national reconciliation silenced the voices of women who endured political violence and fought for human rights. The fact that, in the middle of her inauguration speech of the museum, the ceremony was interrupted by two Mapuche women was telling. They were denouncing s­ tate-­led violence against Mapuche communities, especially in Bachelet’s administration. This was a reminder of how the coalition had ignored other abuses in the country and the role of women in such struggle.37 The museum represented the last chance for the coalition to monumentalise its collective discourse in the public sphere, structured by motifs that deliberately shape the role of women’s work and experiences in the interpretation of the traumatic past. It is precisely this conception of collective memory as a gendered narrative that Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble aim to challenge with recourse to metafictional narrative ­strategies.

Confessions and c­ onversions Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble share an interest in the figure of the female collaborator and her memory practices. In Sime’s text, the experience of collaboration is embodied by a young nurse, María Rosa. Recently returned to Chile in the early 1990s, María Rosa struggles with the memories of her collaboration as a nurse in interrogation and torture sessions. She is also haunted by her involvement in the assassination of an important political leader of the opposition. The novel focuses on the depiction of María Rosa’s unexpected r­ e-­encounter with Emilio Krank, her former torturer and lover. Krank is a terminal cancer patient dying in the same public hospital María Rosa has been working in since her return to the country. Hoping she will help him end his suffering, Krank orders María Rosa to kill him. After weeks of tortured deliberations, María Rosa helps him to die by giving him a fatal i­ njection. In the case of La Vida Doble, the novel is a fi ­ rst-­person narrative that adopts the form of a c­ onfession-­testimony of former regime collaborator: Irene/Lorena. Her addressee is an unspecified writer who has travelled to Sweden to hear her story of betrayal. Her narrative covers her involvement in the political upheaval of Allende’s administration as a young single mother of bourgeois

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origins who later leads a clandestine life as militant of Hacha Roja, a fictional far left urban guerrilla movement. But Irene/Lorena also remembers her transformation into a regime collaborator, a lover of perpetrators and an officer in Pinochet’s secret police. She assists in hunting down her clandestine group and in the interrogation and death of former comrades. Both novels use metafiction to depict the confrontation of female collaborators with the traumatic ­past. The novels’ metafictional strategies emerge in the description of the figure of the female collaborator and her narrative of her traumatic past. In their representations of María Rosa’s and Irene/ Lorena’s stories, Sime and Fontaine use the image of the ‘remorseful’ female collaborator in the aftermath of violence. In this sense, both novels seem to share affinities with a distinctive type of testimonial writing that emerged soon after the end of the military regime. The significance of the figure of the female collaborator in the Chilean politics of memory is better grasped after reading the confessions of Marcia Merino, Mi Verdad (1993) and Luz Arce, El Infierno (1993).38 Just three years after the end of the regime, these real female testimonies emerged. Merino’s and Arce’s testimonies became the first, and only, n ­on-­ fictional accounts of female collaborators to be published in the country. Certainly, Merino’s and Arce’s testimonies are mournful confessions of betrayal. Both texts bear witness to the complete degradation of these women during their captivity. They also confront the reasons behind their collaboration. The aim of their confessions, as both women state, is to receive public absolution.39 Merino declares that ‘Me anima la convicción que sólo la Verdad hará posible la Justicia y la Reconciliación en Chile’40 (‘what motivates me is the conviction that only the Truth will make Justice and Reconciliation possible in Chile’). For Arce, public confession is another milestone in the process of recovering her shattered identity. The opening of her testimony is quite revealing of this objective: ‘My name is Luz Arce. It has been very difficult for me to recover that name. There is a kind of black legend about me, a vague story created out of the horrific, humiliating, and violent reality’.­41 In her discussion of the female collaborator in Chile’s politics of memory, Nelly Richard points out that Merino’s and Arce’s confessions are also ‘conversions’. Both texts describe the moral

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transformation of these women after embracing Catholicism. This helped them to acknowledge their faults and gave them the courage to tell the whole truth in their search for public forgiveness.42 This conversion meant that they identified themselves with the passion of Christ. They also embraced ideals of Catholic femininity associated with the family and motherhood. Sime and Fontaine seem to model María Rosa’s and Irene/Lorena’s confessions on the C ­ hristian-­like processes of humiliation and redemption that characterise Merino’s and Arce’s narrations. As in Mi Verdad and El Infierno, the itinerary of torture and abuse is described in vivid detail by a ­third-­person narrator in Carne de Perra and by Irene/Lorena in La Vida Doble. By doing this, both narratives seem to appeal to the empathy of the reader. In Carne de Perra, the narrator painstakingly describes scenes of torture and sexual abuse, showing the horror of political violence from an often gynaecologically focused point of view. With this information, the reader is torn between condemning María Rosa as a collaborator or sympathising with her as another victim of the regime. Significantly, such scenes are only presented to the reader before the narration of María Rosa’s collaboration. In La Vida Doble, Irene/Lorena describes her experiences in similar detail. But she also allows the reader access to her thoughts and feelings when undergoing torture and abuse. Thus, the reader is invited to experience such events from Irene/Lorena’s point of view, which will eventually affect his or her judgment of the collaborator’s past ­actions. In addition, the novels also represent another image associated with women during the transition: the image of the sacrificial woman. Indeed, as in the case of Luz Arce in El Infierno, who started to collaborate after close relatives were tortured by agents of the state, both María Rosa’s and Irene/Lorena’s collaborations are explained as resulting from threats to their families by agents of Pinochet’s secret police during torture sessions: María Rosa’s elderly parents and Irene/Lorena’s young daughter, Ana.43 It is significant that the testimonies of male collaborators do not follow a ­Christian-­like rhetoric of humiliation, sacrifice and redemption.44 Instead, they structure their testimonies as ‘heroic confessions’. They are narratives that reinforce the understanding of the coup and the military government as an attempt to save the country.45 However, they still deploy imagery that reinforces a

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gendered memory discourse. In this case, they depict a patriarchal, masculine version of the traumatic past, where men and women have specific roles defined by essentialist views on gender identity. The following passage from La Vida Doble shows how Irene/ Lorena’s collaboration is transformed into a sacrificial act. In this sense, it conforms to the aims outlined by El Infierno’s prologuist, Friar José Luis de Miguel, O. P., that the book ‘is a confession that also seeks conversion, catharsis, reconciliation, and the triumph of truth’.46 Irene/Lorena shapes her recollection in the following ­terms: Primero fue una foto y después un video, un par de minutos de video proyectado en una pequeña cámara de televisión que alguno de ellos enchufó y puso en el suelo: ella, ella saliendo con su faldita azul. Venía conversando con una amiga y la sentí reírse. Eso fue. Necesito que ella pueda seguir riendo, me dije. Entonces me rendí. Entonces me convertí en una de e­ llos.47 (First it was the photo, and then a video, a couple of minutes of video shown on a small video camera that one of them plugged in and placed on the floor: her, Anita, coming out of school in her little blue skirt. She was talking to a friend and I heard her laugh. That was it. I need for her to go on laughing. I said to myself. And I surrendered. And became one of them).­48

Irene/Lorena’s confession of her sacrificial collaboration shows traditional ideas regarding the woman’s ‘natural’ identity as mother and protector of the family in Chilean society. Other events in the novel confirm this reading. At the beginning of her testimony, Irene/Lorena recalls how she refused the suggestion of the leader of her clandestine group to send her daughter to La Havana as a security measure.49 Even though she is a committed militant inspired by the rhetoric of Che Guevara’s ‘hombre nuevo’,50 Irene/ Lorena considers it her duty to take care of her daughter.51 Moreover, her confession to the unknown writer in Sweden is a paid interview. Irene/Lorena has accepted three thousand dollars for five hours of conversation. With this amount of money, Irene/ Lorena will be able to leave Ana a significant amount of money as her inheritance.52 Irene/Lorena’s maternal drive echoes Arce’s religious one, whose testimony, under the guidance of God, helped her ‘to appreciate family, to be a mother, to keep commitments, to want to rebuild a relationship with Juan Manuel … and to begin to

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regain trust in people’.53 In Carne de Perra, María Rosa remains silent when she ­re-­encounters her family after almost two decades of absence, despite the facial scars that she bears as traces of political violence.54 Silence is her way of protecting her elderly parents from the horror of the past. The ultimate goal of these confessions (real and fictional) is to promote the image of the reconciled family at a private and collective level in the aftermath of v­ iolence. However, it is also clear that the mobilisation of these gendered images by Sime and Fontaine is not carried out to reinforce official memory discourses. Such gendered narratives are refuted by the treatment Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble advance of the repentant and C ­ hristian-­like narration of a shameful past. Both novels invoke the reader’s collaboration through a realist aesthetic and by appealing to his or her feelings of empathy and pity for María Rosa’s and Irene/Lorena’s sacrifices. But they use metafictional strategies to subvert these feelings. They expose these confessions and conversions to be discursive, patriarchal constructions. For instance, both protagonists’ strained relationships with their families in ­post-­dictatorial Chile are later shown to be shaped by satire in Carne de Perra and intertextuality in La Vida Doble. By doing this, both novels introduce a different narrative of the family into the discourse of p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chile. The ‘wounded family’ narrative of relatives of victims of human rights violations and the ‘reconciled family’ narrative of the transitional years are both displaced. Instead, the novels focus on a narrative of the ‘estranged family’. The penitent collaborator cannot simply confirm the image of the reconciled family. It is a discursive construction with political and cultural consequences for her process of identity-­ formation. Therefore, its significance expands the idea of memory in p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chile to include the ambiguous position from which female collaborators remember the past. These figures complicate the official duty of remembrance in the ­country. In Carne de Perra, for example, the r­ e-­encounter between María Rosa and her family is disastrous. During her first visit to her hometown after many years of absence, family and friends are present in a welcome gathering for her. However, María Rosa’s interactions with her relatives stress the silencing of the previous eighteen years of her life. Soon, the fantasy of the reunited Chilean family is further undermined. In the gathering, one of María Rosa’s nephews is present: Julito. The youngster, María Rosa points out,

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exhibits some form of cognitive impairment, which is a source of pain for the whole family. Interested and surprised by the arrival of this mysterious woman and the attention she receives from all the guests, the boy suddenly joins the conversation: ‘No sé si fue ahí o más adelante, pero de pronto el hijo de mi hermana, el que no paraba de sonreír, preguntó a voz en cuello si yo era la puta perdida. Se hizo un silencio’55 (‘I do not know if it happened then or later, but suddenly my sister’s son, the one that could not stop smiling, asked aloud if I was the missing whore. It all went quiet’.) This metafictional moment, invested with ­ cringe-­ making humour, mocks the idea of the reconciled family in democratic Chile. Through this boy, Sime introduces a naïve voice, widely used in literature through characters such as the rogue, the clown or the madman.56 According to Bakhtin, this device, ‘deliberate on the part of the author, simpleminded and naïve on the part of the protagonist – always takes on great organising potential when an exposure of … conventionality is involved’.57 Thus, through this device Sime reminds the reader about the generic conventions of the novel as fiction. But also, she points out the utility of such narrative devices for exposing, in this case, the conventionality of gendered discourses regarding the traumatic past. Julito’s naïve question highlights for the characters and readers the existence of untouchable gendered conventions regarding the past: women are unifying symbols for the reconstruction of Chile’s national family. Julito’s intervention (calling María Rosa ‘puta perdida’ in a family gathering held in her honour) subverts the social conventions regarding the traumatic past in democratic Chile. Moreover, the boy unintentionally voices another gendered memory discourse that the Chilean family does not dare to declare openly in the presence of an ambiguous victim of the military regime. It is revealing that María Rosa’s father soon after this episode becomes completely inebriated and forgets her presence for the rest of the day. The boy’s cringeworthy utterance destroys the socially constructed normativity of the reconciled Chilean family. He voices perpetuated images associated with women involved in politics, mobilised during the military dictatorship but still in operation in democratic Chile. This incident becomes a satire of the Chilean family and its ‘reconciliatory gatherings’, divested of the official gendered normativity attached to the traumatic past. Through a simple-­ minded voice, the double standards of gendered discourses of the

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past are foregrounded, exposing their function in transitional Chile and ultimately their ­artificiality. Later in the novel, an incident between María Rosa and her sister Luisa evidences the definitive fracture of the united Chilean family. After receiving an excessive and clearly uncomfortable amount of care and attention from her sister, María Rosa expresses her dissatisfaction with this behaviour. Luisa (incidentally, Julito’s mother) responds by slapping her face furiously. This event becomes the catalyst for a discussion that allows Luisa to express repressed feelings about the memory of the traumatic p ­ ast: ¡Pasa que nos cagaste la vida a todos y nos estás cagando de nuevo! … Han pasado dieciocho años, Rosa. ¿No sabes acaso cómo se enfermó la mamá buscándote? Visitando milicos, asociaciones, puertas de embajadas, de curas. ¿Quién la acompañaba? Nosotras. La Cristina y yo. Nos obligaba. Nos pegaba una foto tuya en los chalecos … No sabes el tiempo, los años que perdimos. ¿Por qué lo hacíamos, Rosa? … ¡Por sentimientos de culpa! ¡Nos sentíamos culpables de estar vivas y tú muerta! … ¿Por qué te apareces ahora, Rosa? ¿Por qué cagarnos más?­58 You fucked everybody’s life up and you are fucking us all up again! … It has been eighteen years, Rosa. I don’t suppose you know how mother got ill searching for you? Visiting soldiers, and associations, knocking on the doors of embassies and priests. Who went with her? Us. Me and Cristina. She forced us. She used to stick a picture of you on our sweaters … You have no idea how much time, how many years we wasted. Why did we do it, Rosa? … Out of guilt! We felt guilty that we were alive and you were dead! … Why show up now, Rosa? Why fuck us up any ­more?

The passage depicts an image that has become exemplary of the role of women during the dictatorship and of their memorial practices in the Southern cone: groups of women (‘nosotras’) carrying images of the disappeared in the public sphere, reminders of the traumatic past in an amnesic neoliberal present. Yet, by including Luisa’s memories, the passage questions the way such public memorial performances have been nationalised by transitional governments. In the novel, they do not function as an expression of the abnegation, sacrificial and familial qualities of women in the face of adversity. The passage stresses other affects attached to women in their mourning of the past, such as frustration, resentment and anger. This portrayal becomes another way in which the

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novel challenges the image of women within the discourse of the reconciled Chilean family. The reappearance of the disappeared daughter is presented as a disruptive event, more burdensome than healing for Chile’s triumphant p ­ resent. Similarly, in La Vida Doble the relationship between Irene/ Lorena and her daughter draws attention to the familial tensions in the aftermath of violence. For instance, her daughter Anita has lived most of her life with her grandmother. Mother and daughter only develop a relationship in exile, but Anita is soon able to learn Swedish and fully embraces Swedish culture and society, which creates a distance between them. As soon as Anita is able to emigrate, she leaves Irene/Lorena in Sweden and returns to Chile to meet and live with her father. Anita settles permanently in Chile and never returns to Sweden. Her decisions are particularly revealing of the tensions of the Chilean family, since her move to Chile is also the result of her suspicion that Irene/Lorena cannot return to the country. Irene/Lorena’s relationship with her parents is equally distant. She barely calls them while they are still alive or while Anita and Irene/Lorena are living in Sweden. Irene/Lorena does not appear to be the model of femininity commonly associated with women in the memory discourses of the Concertación coalition: the natural binding force of the family in reconciled Chile. In fact, Irene/Lorena recognises the function of such discourses in ­ post-­ dictatorial Chile, but she is not willing to embrace such gendered ­narratives. Irene/Lorena develops this line of criticism further through the intertexts she uses to shape her narrative of experiences and events from the past. Her intertextual references demonstrate her intellectual capital. However, it is argued that they also produce an abundance of references. This strategy allows Irene/Lorena to present herself as not bound by monolithic identity discourses that shape the memory of the traumatic past. Rather, she becomes a subject undergoing a process of constant ­re-­evaluation. Certainly, Irene/Lorena’s narrative is structured to show how a wide range of discourses (lyrical, philosophical, sociological and theological, among others) shape her identity. When retelling the story of her radical militancy and political commitment, she openly punctuates her narrative with quotations that she knows by heart. For instance, she uses Cervantes to explain the political aims of Hacha ­Roja:

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Todos queríamos recuperar la dichosa edad y siglos a los que los antiguos pusieron el nombre de dorados porque entonces los que en ella vivían igno­ raban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío. Eran en aquella santa edad las cosas comunes …­59 We all wanted to recover that happy age to which the ancients gave the name of golden, because they that lived in it knew not the two words ‘mine’ and ‘thine’! In that blessed age all things were common …­60

In quoting Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Irene/Lorena initially conveys a heroic conception of the revolution in a romanticised register. But this conception is soon shattered by the harsh reality of dictatorial rule. Other citations later in the novel show how Irene/Lorena departs from these delusional ideas of guerrilla warfare. She embraces texts by Lenin, Martí and Che Guevara in relation to armed struggle. At different points in the novel, she quotes texts such as: ‘Hay que ser un monje de la revolución’61 (‘revolutionary monks’)62, ‘hoy cuando el verbo se avergüenza ante la podredumbre, la mejor manera de decir es hacer’,63 (‘Today, when the verb is brought low before the putrefaction, the best way to speak is to act’)64 and ‘Eso significa una guerra larga … Y, lo repetimos una vez más, una guerra cruel. Que nadie se engañe’65 (‘This is going to be a long war … And, we repeat once again, a cruel war. Let no one fool himself ’).­66 The same intertextual procedures extend to Irene/Lorena’s narrative of her years of collaboration. It is possible to detect the traces of many other discourses in her attempts to narrate her survival strategies. Significantly, these references foreground ideas regarding her past decisions and their relation to ethics and society. For example, she frequently quotes Nietzsche when remembering her time as collaborator. When describing the operation that ended up with the death of the leader of her former clandestine group, el Espartano, she emphasises how ‘Me recomía una sed de enemigos y de resistencias y de triunfos’67 (‘I was consumed by a thirst for enemies and opposition and triumph’).68 She also quotes Nietzsche when reflecting on her work as an agent for Pinochet’s secret police: ‘Nada es verdadero, todo está permitido. Porque somos bárbaros disfrazados; eso somos’69 (‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted. Because we are disguised barbarians; that’s what we are’).70 But perhaps the most telling example of a discourse that departs from the official memory in democratic Chile occurs when she remembers the death of her friend and comrade, el Cuyano. He was captured after she betrays h ­ im:

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Esa noche y todo el día siguiente, en la Central, oí sus alaridos. Después supe que se les había ido … ¿Habré sentido real pena por el Cuyano? Y si no, ¿por qué? ¿me impresioné y me contuve? Quizás. ¡Por la mierda! Esta existencia es inmoral … Y esta vida reposa en hipótesis inmorales: y toda moral niega la vida. Yo fui una agente implacable. Eso sé. Tenía una rabia feroz. Nunca nadie sabrá a cuántos me cagué. Fui la traidora máxima, la puta reina que se los mamó a estos conchudos …­71 That night and all the next day, in Central, I heard his screams. Later I found out he’d died on them … Did I feel real regret for Cuyano? And if I didn’t, why not? Did it affect me, and I just managed to bottle up my emotions? Maybe. Shit! This existence is inmoral … And this life depends on inmorals preconditions: and all morality denies life. I was a ruthless agent. I know that. I had a ferocious rage. No one will ever know how many people I fucked over. I was the ultimate warrior, the whore queen sucking those scumbags off …­72

The quotation from Nietzsche, with its particular attention to his ideas regarding the structuring of society, evidences her refusal to justify her past decisions. As with the writings of Che Guevara or Lenin, Irene/Lorena seems to agree with Nietzsche’s critical take on the modern moral system that regulates society. For Irene/ Lorena, if life depends upon immoral preconditions, it is possible to partially explain why she embraced violence and collaborated in the deaths and betrayals of her former comrades. However, throughout the whole novel, Irene/Lorena will quote fragments that inform her narrative in a way that appears almost compulsive, ranging from Dante’s ‘Deja toda tu esperanza tú que entras’73 (‘Abandon all hope those who enter here’)74 to Dylan Thomas’s ‘No te vayas suavemente a esa buena noche. / La vejez debiera arder y enfurecerse al final del día; / rabia, rabia contra la muerte de la luz’75 (‘Do not go gentle into that good night / Old age should burn and rave at close of day / Rage, rage against the dying of the light’).76 In this sense, her narrative is heterogeneous, the opposite of the standardised memory discourses of transitional Chile. Irene/Lorena uses an uncontrolled intertextuality to introduce a myriad of other discourses that have shaped her formative years, but also shaped her militancy and duplicity. In doing so, she ultimately makes the gendered memory discourses of the present redundant. Under the cumulative pressure of her references, they become just another discursive construct designed to define Chile’s interpretation of an

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inconvenient past and the role of women in such narratives of memory. In La Vida Doble and Carne de Perra, the voice of the female collaborator serves the purpose of foregrounding the gendered memory discourses of the transition, only to later subvert their dominant tropes. The work of the Concertación coalition in rebuilding Chile’s shattered national family, emphasised by Bachelet from her first day in office, is exposed as shaped by gendered images in both novels. The texts achieve this exposition by mobilising an unreliable voice, the female collaborator. The remembering subject inhabits a grey zone: part victim, part perpetrator. Such ambiguity hinders the complete confirmation of the gendered memory discourses of the transition, showing the contradictions and internal tensions of such discursive constructions. Conversion is not the only way a female collaborator can confess to her past deeds in the aftermath of violence. In fact, through recourse to metafictional devices, conversion is exposed to be a discursive construct that serves to confirm the Concertación coalition’s gendered interpretation of the p ­ ast.

Collaborators in d ­ emocracy Diamela Eltit has assessed the hidden agendas behind Marcia Merino’s and Luz Arce’s confessions in the first years of democracy in Chile. What concerns Eltit is the fact that both women admit their transformation into agents of Pinochet’s police during the dictatorship. Eltit argues that the seduction of power seemed to motivate Merino’s and Arce’s collaboration and confessions. Actually, Merino’s and Arce’s confessions were published after their depositions in court and for the Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This suggests that their interest in publishing their stories was to gain some valued position in ­post-­dictatorial Chile. The return to democracy divested Merino and Arce of any authority in the new political order. They simply became legends of the horror in Chile. Merino’s and Arce’s confessions, Eltit concludes, can only be understood as strategies to secure a place in the political arena of democratic C ­ hile.77 Contrary to Eltit’s conclusions, Merino and Arce ended up becoming abject individuals, representative of an inconvenient past in democratic Chile. Despite modelling their confessions on

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the rhetoric of the transition, their tormented testimonies were conveniently silenced by the media. The reason for this response was clearly Merino’s and Arce’s open denunciation of military and civil authorities. They also mentioned businessmen and members of the Catholic Church involved with the military regime and, in some instances, the repressive state apparatuses. The previous section explained the diverse forms in which María Rosa and Irene/Lorena initially embodied the figure of the converted female collaborator in the aftermath of violence. Yet, a close analysis of both characters also shows signs of attraction to the dictatorial past, its representatives and legacies. This section will argue that María Rosa’s and Irene/Lorena’s collaborations in democratic Chile mimic the administration of power of the Concertación, exposing its negotiated pacts and silences. In other words, by imitating the memorial practices of the Coalition, Sime and Fontaine reveal the contradictions within such practices. The discussion of the novels will proceed by exploring how mimicry interrupts two images of the transitional politics of memory: Chilean democracy as a successful process of reconciliation in Carne de Perra and the transformation of the traumatic past into a commodity in La Vida ­Doble. In Carne de Perra, María Rosa’s ambivalent relationship with Krank suggests a more complex entanglement between the dictatorial past and democratic present. María Rosa works in one of the most overcrowded public hospitals, Santiago’s Posta Central. She is the n ­ urse-­in-­chief of the General Surgery section and on a daily basis deals with the torments of Chileans in ‘pasillos repletos de heridos, contusos, quemados, fracturados, intoxicados’78 (‘corridors filled with injured, bruised, burnt, fractured, intoxicated [people]’. The description of her workplace undeniably recalls her past experiences as both victim of and collaborator in political violence during the military regime. But her situation is deliberated. She secured this job because of her impressive work experience in exile, while rejecting other lucrative positions in the private sector.79 This decision suggests her attachment to a tormented past, and by extension to Krank. It also implies her desire to expurgate her guilt. Certainly, María Rosa immerses herself in this stressful job as a punishment for her past deeds. It becomes her penitence for years of collaboration and assistance in the administration of pain to others.80 It is no coincidence that the reunion between

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María Rosa and Krank takes place in a context where pain is scientifically managed. This moment works as an echo of a shared past of agony, misery and despair in torture centres and secret detention ­facilities. María Rosa’s guilt and penitence, though, do not make her an abject figure in the novel. Indeed, Carne de Perra cunningly avoids depicting María Rosa as abject by confronting her with an ethical choice. As mentioned before, the reunion between Krank and María Rosa takes place in an operating room where he has been taken because of a massive haemorrhage. After saving his life, she visits him only to find out that he is a terminal cancer patient. In such circumstances, Krank wants to die. To do this, he needs María Rosa’s assistance and orders her to carry out this final task. This dilemma becomes her central problem in the present and triggers the revision of repressed and shameful memories of pain and ­collaboration. María Rosa’s dilemma certainly recalls one of the most controversial issues handled by the Concertación coalition regarding the past: the Pinochet affair in 1998. By placing María Rosa in this dilemma, Carne de Perra cleverly alludes to the collaboration between Chilean political elites and the past regime in the ­post- ­dictatorship period.81 By suggesting the similarity between these two situations, the novel insinuates that María Rosa’s marginalisation from the political arena in the present, might equally apply to the discrediting of political elites of the transition due to the Pinochet affair. In other words, if María Rosa is made abject because of her role as collaborator during both the dictatorship and ­post-­dictatorship periods, the Concertación coalition might be similarly guilty for silencing an inconvenient past and its legacies. María Rosa’s decision over Krank’s future emulates the consensual politics of memory of the transition. Krank’s quiet, humane and unpunished death with the help of a public worker is a way of forgetting an inconvenient past in order to carry on living. If women are called on to contribute to the reconciliation process by actively obliterating the past, María Rosa’s repetition of a strategy employed by the Concertación coalition foregrounds the ‘clear’ limits that separate regime collaboration and political consensus. This does not mean that Carne de Perra insinuates that collaboration with the regime is the same phenomenon as consensual democracy. The criminal consequences of María Rosa’s

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actions are undeniable. However, the novel arguably suggests, with its recreation of an incident evocative of the Pinochet affair, that the gendered politics of memory of the Concertación is always strategic. The mimicry of consensual logic in the novel only helps to foreground the strategies of this form of memory p ­ olitics. In La Vida Doble, Irene/Lorena’s attachment to the past is of a different kind. However, it also links an inconvenient past to a consensual democratic present. The attention of La Vida Doble in this point focuses on the economic foundations of the dictatorship and the way in which the Concertación coalition deepened and intensified these policies.82 For Irene/Lorena, her story is a commodity or, at least, raw material for the production of cultural products. If María Rosa’s actions in democratic Chile imply her collaboration with the amnesiac drive of the Concertación, Irene/ Lorena’s interview makes explicit the extensive commodification of the past in democratic neoliberal Chile. In this regard, Nelly Richard has stated ­that: El mercado editorial chileno no ha permanecido indiferente a esta nueva curiosidad pública hacia los mundos privados que aspira a que lo desconocido de las vidas de personas conocidas se transforme en la mercancía ­seudo-­clandestina con la que se negocia la industria de los best-­sellers.83 The book industry in Chile has not been indifferent to this new public curiosity in private worlds that aspires to make the unknown of the lives of known people become a p ­ seudo-­clandestine commodity for the ­best-­sellers industry to profit ­from.

Richard is referring to the testimonies of Merino and Arce in particular, but also mentions the autobiographies of female political figures during the dictatorship and transition periods as examples of this phenomenon. Writing at the time of publication of Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble, Richard draws attention to the consolidation of what she calls the new market of the confessional. In Chile, Richard states, this market ‘se basa en el compulsivo voyeurismo social para someter la interioridad no confesada de sus sujetos … a la extroversión mediática de un periodismo que juega a retocar … la ambigüedad de la frontera entre privacidad, secreto y divulgación’84 (‘is based on compulsive social voyeurism to subdue the undisclosed intimacy of subjects … to the media exposure of a type of journalism that likes retouching … the blurred

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lines between privacy, secret and revelation’). Irene/Lorena seems to profit from this situation. Her gesture links a past with commodity value and a present shaped by consumerist drives. As mentioned earlier, Irene/Lorena confesses her past of betrayal and violence in a paid interview to a writer interested in writing a novel about her life. She negotiates a ­five-­hour interview for three thousand US dollars. This interview can be read as the commodification of the traumatic past for its consumption in a democratic, but crucially unreflective present. Irena/Lorena repeatedly makes reference to this lack of reflexivity, concluding that in democratic Chile the traumatic past is just a setting to tell stories to fulfil the consumerist and somewhat morbid desires of the general public. The following passage makes explicit this c­ onclusion: al final buscas una aventura moral. Es lo que te conseguirá una casa editorial. La gente ama la historia que confirma el prejuicio. Reconocer lo que ya les mostró la tele: eso gusta. La verdad es demasiado inquietante, espinuda, contradictoria y espantosa. La verdad es inmoral. No debe imprimirse. Tú no escribirás lo que te cuente. Lo que vas a oír no te va a gustar nada. Lo leo en tus ojos. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère.­85 in the end what you’re looking for is a moral adventure tale. That’s what will get you a publisher. People love a story that confirms their prejudices. To recognise what they’ve already seen on TV: that’s what they like. The truth is too disturbing, thorny, too contradictory and horrible. Truth is immoral. It shouldn’t be printed. You won’t write what I tell you. You’re not going to like what you hear at all. I can read it in your eyes. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère: Hypocritical reader, my double, my brother!­86

­elf-­ S reflexivity appears as the primary metafictional device to remind the reader of the artificiality of literature, but also, and this is crucial to the novel, the complicity of representation with the commodity value of traumatic memories in the present. This incident s­ elf-­consciously represents the seductive potential of traumatic memories for the literary market in ­post-­dictatorial Chile. The only restriction that imposes itself on the ­consumerist-­oriented order is to tell a good o ­ ld-­fashioned moral tale. What Irene/Lorena seems to suggest here is that memory has been turned into a transaction (political, cultural and economic). It is no coincidence that she quotes Baudelaire’s poem ‘To the Reader’, where the world evoked by the speaker is filled with hypocrisy, violence and

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contradiction. By turning her testimony into a commodity, Irene/ Lorena avoids, like María Rosa in Carne de Perra, her abjection within the social order for being a collaborator or, in this case, for being a woman providing the information for a story aligned with an established morality in democratic Chile. The way she negotiates and trades her past parallels her collaboration with the models installed by the military regime and the new political establishment. To expel one would demand the degradation of the other, which ultimately blurs clear limits between collaboration in the past and in the ­present.

Telling ­stories As Diamela Eltit has pointed out, Merino and Arce aim to testify ‘la renuncia al aparato militar y la búsqueda de una nueva jerarquía (política) en el interior del actual Sistema … apelando a un conjunto de discursos que tocan lo seudosicológico, lo sentimental, la reconciliación y la Concertación’87 (‘[their] resignation to the military system and the search for a new (political) hierarchy within the new order … mobilising a body of discourses that alludes to the ­pseudo-­psychological, the sentimental, reconciliation and the Concertación’). The experience of collaboration and its textual representation is, in the texts of Merino and Arce, shaped by specific narrative conventions (the sentimental or the spiritual). These, ultimately, are used to produce discourses aligned with the gendered narratives of reconciliation dominant during ­post-­dictatorial rule. Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble aim to bring those discourses into crisis by exposing the conventions that produce gendered memorial practices in democratic C ­ hile. At first glance it might seem that Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble use the same formulaic images that shape Merino’s and Arce’s tormented testimonies. In Carne de Perra, María Rosa’s story is presented to display the brutality of the military regime and the violent victimisation of women. Similarly to Arce’s testimony that ‘asume una estructura lineal, relat[ando] los hechos en forma progresiva y casual’ in order to clearly and persuasively present herself as a victim,88 (‘adopts a lineal structure, telling facts in a continual and causal fashion’), the narrator in Carne de Perra plots María Rosa’s story of captivity and collaboration almost exclusively

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in a chronological fashion. She describes her time as political prisoner, followed by her sadistic relationship with Krank, participation in a political assassination, later liberation and final ­re-­encounter. Each chapter depicts in painstaking detail the series of violent practices that ultimately turns María Rosa into Krank’s c­ ollaborator. The presence of a romantic element in the text, however, is coupled with a linear structure in order to depict María Rosa’s experiences and memories. A year before the publication of Carne de Perra, a theatrical script by Sime, El Príncipe y su Muñeca Encantada (2008), was read in the Tercera Jornada de Libretos y Guiones Nacionales. This ­pre-­text gives us the first indication of the kind of narrative strategies Sime puts in practice in the novel. In Carne de Perra, Sime reuses the names of her previous work, contained in its title, to label the two main characters of the novel: the torturer Emilio Krank, also known in the text as the prince (‘el Príncipe’) and his victim María Rosa, to whom Krank constantly refers as doll (‘muñeca’). Certainly, the script’s title and the romantic meaning attached to it allude to fairy tales and melodrama, which becomes ironic when considering the novel’s content. Sime reframes and rewrites in a parodic fashion some conventions of these genres to frame María Rosa’s narrative. María Rosa, the ‘enchanted doll’, becomes in the hands of the ­prince-­torturer Krank, a total object of manipulation. Krank’s cruelty is demonstrated by playfully distorting other elements of the f­airy-­tale genre. The narrator emphasises how Krank describes the flat where he locked up María Rosa as ‘nuestro castillo encantado’ or ‘el castillo del príncipe y la muñeca’89 (‘our enchanted castle’, ‘the castle of the prince and the princess’). Krank also declares himself María Rosa’s protector at the same time as he threatens her with more violence: ‘Mire cómo está dejando los zapatos nuevos. ¿Quién se los compró? ¿Quién le compró ese vestido, la cartera? Yo pues, su príncipe’90 (‘Look how you are ruining your b ­ rand-­new shoes. Who bought them for you? Who bought you this dress, this bag? I did, your prince’). But perhaps the most telling example of Sime’s flirtation with the conventions of the fairy tale is the link she establishes between the themes of the ‘enchanted princess’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘captivity’ in the novel. After years locked in Krank’s flat, this is how the narrator describes María Rosa’s daily r­ outine: Saca al balcón el piso de la cocina. Es pequeño, plegable. Perfecto para escapar y acarrearlo cuando sea necesario … A veces lo que ve

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cruzando el parque es un terno, o una corbata. A veces, un uniforme, bototos, o pantalón de mezclilla. No importa. Cuando el hombre se acerca, siempre lo reconoce … ¿Cuántas veces ha cambiado de color el parque? ¿Cuántas veces perdió las hojas? Por lo menos dos años … El hombre llega a cualquier hora con el paquete. Todos los días se detiene en los Establecimientos Oriente a comprar pasteles. Siempre de crema. La crema es complicada. Se adhiere al fondo, se pierde entre las rugosidades de la vagina. Haga lo que haga, su entrepierna despide un extraño olor a flores podridas. Por eso le gusta matar el tiempo libre en el balcón, le parece que su sexo se ventila, que se va el ­olor.91 She takes the kitchen stool to the balcony. It is small and foldable. Perfect for escaping and carrying whenever necessary … Sometimes what she sees crossing the park is a suit, or a tie. Sometimes, a uniform, a pair of boots, or a pair of jeans. It doesn’t matter. When the man is coming, she always recognises him … How many times did the park change colour? How many times has the park changed colour? How many times has it lost all its leaves? At least two years … The man arrives at any time of the day with a package. Everyday he stops at the Establecimientos Oriente to buy cakes. Always cream ones. Cream is complicated. It sticks to the bottom; it sinks between the creases of the vagina. No matter what she does, her crotch releases a weird smell of rotten flowers. That is why she likes killing time on the balcony, it seems that it airs her vulva out, that the smell ­disappears.

Several elements of the fairy tale converge here to construct the image of the defenceless woman. María Rosa’s captivity, and later collaboration, is ironically depicted incorporating the motif of supernatural enchantment. It is no coincidence she is represented in the passage above waiting in a balcony like a ‘damsel in distress’ hoping for the arrival of her saviour. Her long captivity in the flat (two years) echoes similar elements in traditional fairy tales. The narrator also emphasises, almost in a supernatural fashion, Krank’s ‘power’ to turn into different objects (a suit, a tie, a uniform or military boots), which also recalls a traditional element of fairy tales.92 The fact that the apartment is also described as located in front of an urban park, an echo of the motif of the enchanted forest, confirms Sime’s mobilisation of fairy tale elements to remind the reader of the artificial constructedness of the narrative (in this case, shaped by many gendered conventions). Undoubtedly, the transformation of the unbelievable into the quotidian, Krank’s

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torture methods alluded to in the last part of the passage above, is clearly what moves Olea to argue that this narrative strategy allows Sime to ‘narrar el horror, de mostrarlo como esa inquietante co-­ existencia de los códigos familiares … y de lo inimaginable … lo familiar se muestra como una realidad ominosa, ilegible’93 (‘narrate the horror, showing it as a disturbing coexistence of familiar codes … and of the unimaginable … the familiar is shown as an ominous, indecipherable reality’). Sime also parodically reframes melodrama in Carne de Perra. The opening of the novel reveals such intentions. Krank and María Rosa are depicted by the narrator as a couple driving to the movies. Suddenly Krank stops the car next to a lovely park. After María Rosa’s initial dissatisfaction with this sudden change of plans, Krank reveals to María Rosa a surprise and points to one of the balconies of an elegant building, a place where another revelation awaits her.94 Even after the reader is informed of the actual nature of their relationship, the narrator does not stop using melodramatic imagery to describe the couple’s interactions. For instance, the narrator later introduces Krank as the archetype of masculinity of this genre: ‘Está frente a ella, con las manos a la espalda y el tórax desafiante. Un cigarrillo colgando de la comisura le da un aspecto de ¿galán de película? Parece ridículo, pero así es. Así lo percibe ella al menos’95 (‘He is in front of her, both arms behind his back and his chest sticking out. A cigarette hanging from the corners of his mouth gives him an air of a movie star? It seems stupid, but that is how it is. At least, she sees it like that’). In fact, crucial events in María Rosa’s life are also modelled on romantic elements. For example, the reunion between the woman and Krank is described from her perspective as the return of a tormented love affair. Indeed, the former lovers are able to recognise themselves after almost twenty years in a melodramatic fashion: ‘Alguien me jaló el delantal y aprisionó mi mano. Las yemas de mis dedos reconocieron su tacto al instante y entonces giré la cabeza. Era él’96 (‘Someone pulled my uniform and grabbed my hand. My fingertips instantly recognised his touch and then I turned my head. It was him’). In addition, throughout the narrative, the lyrics of the traditional Peruvian waltz ‘Cariño malo’, the story of the casual ­re-­encounter between a ­broken-­hearted woman and her ­mean-­spirited lover, resonate in the life of María Rosa. Her separation from Krank, after completing her mission, is also

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described as the end of a love affair: ‘Mírame a los ojos. Apenas salgas por la puerta vas a olvidar por completo estos años conmigo. ¿Olvidar? ¿Me estás pidiendo que me olvide de ti, de nosotros? Mírame y grábalo en tu mente: nosotros nunca existimos’97 (‘Look into my eyes. As soon as you go out that door you are going to forget all these years with me. Forget? Are you asking me to forget you, forget us? Look at me and get it in your head: we never existed’). But perhaps Carne de Perra’s most evident mobilisation of melodrama occurs near the end of the novel. Tormented by Krank’s final order, María Rosa steps into a seedy bar and starts chatting with the bartender about her troubles, a scene that has become a convention of romantic and noir ­films: ¿Usted cree que llevando una vida miserable, me refiero a miserable de verdad, peor que en una cárcel, uno paga sus culpas? Depende, dijo él. ¿Depende de qué?, pregunté yo. De la gravedad de lo que le hizo a la otra persona. Las heridas de amor son cosa seria. Aquí en el bar lo veo todos los días. Digamos que la persona cometió algo espantoso, algo horrendo, inimaginable. ¿Quiere que le diga algo?, dijo él, mirando nuevamente para los lados: nada es tan terrible cuando ha habido amor … Claro que si hay terceros, siguió diciendo él, ahí hay que entrar a reparar. ¿Reparar? Claro, pues, con los hijos no se juega. Abandonar al marido es una cosa, pero si dejó a los hijos, mi dama . . .­98 Do you think that by living miserably, I mean really miserably, worse than in jail, one purges one’s sins? It all depends, he said. On what? I asked. The gravity of what you did to the other person. Tha pain of love is a serious business. I see it everyday here in the bar. Let us say the person did something awful, terrible, unimaginable. Do you want my opinion? He said, looking again to both sides: nothing is that horrible when there has been love … Of course, if there is a third party involved, he keeps saying, then it is necessary to repair the damage. Repair? Of course, because, children are important. Leaving the husband is one thing, but abandoning children, my dear lady …

In this formulaic and melodramatic scene, ‘Reparar’ is a key word that helps to highlight the conventions of official memory discourses towards the traumatic past in ­ post-­ dictatorial rule Chile. For example, this word appears in the text of President Aylwin’s executive order Nº 355 (25 April 1990) that created the Chilean National Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It stated

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that: ‘solo el conocimiento de la verdad rehabilitará en el concepto público la dignidad de las víctimas, facilitará a sus familiares y deudos la posibilidad de honrarlas como corres­ponde y permitirá reparar en alguna medida el daño causado’99 (‘only knowing the truth will restore the dignity of the victims  within the public sphere, will provide their relatives and mourners the opportunity to honour them properly, and will allow some reparation for the damage inflicted’). It is no coincidence that in her inaugural speech, Bachelet alluded to this persistent idea of the Concertación coalition when she claimed: ‘En estos dieciséis años de democracia hemos trabajado juntos para limar las asperezas de una sociedad dividida, de una sociedad que nos separaba entre los aquellos y los nuestros’100 (‘During these sixteeen years of democracy we have worked together to smooth things over in a divided society, in a society that separated us between those and ours’). Bachelet again declared similar words during the inauguration of the Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos in 2010: ‘La inauguración de este Museo es una poderosa señal del vigor de un país unido. Unión que se funda en el compromiso compartido de nunca más volver a sufrir una tragedia como la que en este lugar siempre recordaremos …’101 (‘The inauguration of this museum is a powerful sign of the strength of a united country. Unity based upon the shared commitment of never again experiencing a tragedy such as the one we will forever remember in this place’). ‘Reparar’, then, is an index of an agenda consistently foregrounded during the four governments of the Concertación coalition. This is evident here through Rosa’s repetition of the word as a question (‘¿Reparar?’), since the term has strong associations with political and judicial ­discourses. Therefore, when Sime reframes the action in Carne de Perra with recourse to the fairy tale and melodrama, she ingeniously calls attention to constructions of women in the memory discourses of the Concertación coalition: as either helpless or sacrificial. For the reader, the fairy tale and melodrama come to be part of the conventions of ­ post-­ dictatorial memory discourses regarding women. The reader is made aware that the novel’s actions are narrated through fictions where women are commonly stereotyped and placed in a subordinate position, often passive and vulnerable. The purpose behind the mobilisation of these elements is to highlight how narrative conventions help to expose the

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legitimation and perpetuation, as Ronit Lentin reminds us, of a patriarchal collective memory discourse in democracy and questions its gendered m ­ otifs. La Vida Doble uses different metafictional strategies to call attention to the production of gendered memory narratives of the Concertación coalition. As mentioned earlier, Fontaine acknowledges the diverse bibliographical sources he used to write La Vida Doble at the end of the novel. Among them are Merino’s and Arce’s testimonies. However, as Olea notices, Arce’s text is apparently the prototype for the novel.102 In fact, most critical analysis of female collaboration has focused on Arce’s testimony, probably as a result of the length and level of elaboration of both texts. Arce’s confession extends to almost 400 pages while Mi Verdad barely reaches 140 of actual testimony.103 However, what is most remarkable about Arce’s text is the way she frames her confession according to the dominant discourses that shape the gendered politics of memory in p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chile. It is precisely these forces that the metafictional strategies in La Vida Doble aim to displace, in order to interrupt the production and perpetuation of transitional ­male-­centred memory discourses of the ­past. Of all the novels discussed in this book, Fontaine’s text most explicitly deploys s­ elf-­reflexive elements in its representation of the traumatic past. Significantly, these moments are juxtaposed with Irene/Lorena’s allusions to the politics of memory of the Concertación coalition contained in Arce’s testimony. The first instance of this strategy takes place at the beginning of the novel. Soon after Irene/Lorena’s detailed, realist description of the circumstances of her first capture, prison and torture to the mute ­w riter-­interviewer, she stops the narration in order to reflect on the telling of her story and reception in contemporary ­Chile: Nadie puede comprender esta historia. Y nadie lo querría. Es inútil. Quedará la fábula edificante con su moraleja, quedará la cáscara de los hechos, la pornografía del horror. Eso ya se sabe … No sé cómo usarás lo que te cuento … No sé si te servirá de algo. No creo que una novela deba repetir la realidad. Tal vez debieras imaginarme tú ­solo.104 No one can understand this story. And no one would want to. It’s useless. Only the edifying fable with its moral will remain, only the husk of the facts, the pornography of horror. We know that … I don’t know how you’ll use what I tell you … I don’t know if it will help you

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at all. I don’t think a novel should repeat reality. Perhaps you should just imagine me on your ­own.105

Following this ­self-­reflexive moment, she alludes to the politics of memory recognisable in Arce’s confession. In her book, Arce explicitly declares her ­re-­encounter with certain ‘essential truths’ that help her to confess her painful experiences: her ‘natural’ call as mother and wife and the existence of God: ‘One day I awoke and knew that God existed. I couldn’t believe it. It was like an awakening on a sunny day. I got dressed happily, and I went to the window. God was everywhere shouting out the joys of the immense wonders of his creation’.106 These ‘truths’ help Arce to produce, in the words of Irene/Lorena, a ‘fábula edificante con su moraleja’107 (the edifying fable with its moral).108 But Irene/Lorena is eager to remind the reader that such ‘truths’ are views of a Catholic, patriarchal society that shapes the production of memory discourses in ­post-­dictatorial Chile. In the above quotation, the influence of the Catholic Church is made explicit for the reader and what makes Irene/Lorena sceptical about other confessions such as Arce’s. This ­self-­reflexive moment in the novel ends with Irene/Lorena, it is implied, alluding to and criticising Arce’s moral agenda: ‘Hay algo indigno en el arrepentimiento y el deseo de perdón, algo cristianoide que me molesta’109 (‘There’s something undignified about repentance and the desire for forgiveness, something Christianoid that bothers me’).­110 An example of this intention occurs in Chapter 20, just prior to Irene/Lorena’s second detention and transformation into regime collaborator. Until this point in the narrative, Irene/Lorena has described in detail her political commitment and the activities of Hacha Roja. Chapter 20 is perhaps the most historically based section of the novel, since Irene/Lorena discusses in a ­documentary-­like fashion, crucial events111 in the history of the guerrilla movements during and after the dictatorship to point out the memory practices of the transition: ‘Todo eso olvidan los amos del negocio de la negociación’112 (‘the lords of the commerce of concession have forgotten all that now’).113 Excited by the memories of such events, she criticises the betrayal of political elites to the guerrilla movements that greatly contributed to the end of Pinochet’s regime. That is why during the chapter she refers to Chile’s present as a ‘democracia espuria’114 (‘phony democracy’),115 a place where ‘Ganaron los señorones del gran negocio de la

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negociación “pacífica”’ (‘The victory went to the bigwigs of the big business of “peaceful” negotiation’) and where ‘“una salida democrática pactada”’116 (‘a “democratic exit”’) prevails.117 And it is precisely in the middle of this ardent defence of a historical memory, obliterated by four consecutive Concertación governments, that she points out to the voiceless ­w riter-­interviewer (and the reader): Mira, ya nadie comulga con ruedas de carreta. Tú debes decirle a tu lector: usted está leyendo una novela, esto es mentira pura. Eso te estaría exigiendo Clementina. Y sigues contando a partir de ahí y lo haces de tal manera, con tanta magia, que él se te entrega y colabora. Y entonces tú, de nuevo, haces trizas su inocencia. La textura cede, se rompe como un saco roto, lo has traicionado. Era sólo otra ingeniosa mentira montada sobre la anterior, le dices. Y el lector se marea y nada le parece ni real ni irreal y queda apresado en tus abismos e invenciones, no tiene escapatoria, sólo puede seguir colaborando dócilmente en la otra, la nueva textura, la del nuevo saco, el nuevo manto que enmascara al combatiente … Esto eres si es que eres escritor: un engañador que desengaña para engañar una vez más.­118 Look, these days no one’s going to buy a pig in a poke. You have to tell your reader: you are reading a novel, these are pure lies. That’s what Clementina would demand. And you keep going from there and you do it in such a way, with such magic, that the reader gives himself over and goes along with you. And then, you destroy his innocence again. The texture gives way, it breaks like a torn sack, you’ve betrayed him. It was just one more ingenious lie built on top of the other one, you tell him. And the reader gets dizzy and nothing seems real or unreal and he’s a prisoner among your amazements and inventions, he has no way out, he can only go on cooperating in this other thing, the new texture of the new sack, the new mantle that masks the combatant … That’s what you are if you are a writer: a liar who tells the truth in order to lie once m ­ ore.119

As a consequence of this metafictional strategy, Fontaine establishes a link between the creation of fictions: in this case, tales based on the military dictatorship as its historical referent, and the production of official memory discourses in p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chile. Both narratives of the (traumatic) past are the result of the utilisation of selected conventions and tropes. By mobilising narrative ­self-­reflexivity next or close to moments in the novel that allude to the politics of memory, Fontaine reminds the reader of the proximity of both discourses of the past as strategic productions that

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enable one to reflect critically on the conventions that shape them. By repeatedly presenting the reader with such instances of ­self-­reflexivity, La Vida Doble does not claim that literature is the proper medium to represent, as Hutcheon reminds us, the voices of previously ‘silent’ groups defined by differences of gender and other identity markers. What literature can do, through metafictional strategies, is remind the reader of the artificiality of narratives of the past, either fictional or n ­ on-­fictional, and their gendered ­conventions. By foregrounding the extent to which the gendered politics of memory are criticised in Sime’s and Fontaine’s novels of female collaboration, this chapter has highlighted the objectives behind the metafictional elements of these texts. In both novels, the attention to elements not traditionally considered as realist allows Sime and Fontaine to dismantle and challenge the conventions that shape narratives of the past, fictional (Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble) or n ­ on-­fictional (the gendered politics of memory of the democratic transition). In this process, both texts engage with the dismantling of gendered tropes as they are depicted in the politics of memory. One instance of this strategy occurs in both novels, when the idea of female confession as an act of spiritual conversion in accordance with the morality of the democratic transition is undermined. In both texts, ­non-­realist elements help to expose the ‘realist’ depiction of this process of spiritual conversion as a politically strategic, patriarchal construct. The novels also engage with mimicry and s­ elf-­reflexivity, as metafictional narrative strategies, to make a link between the logics of female collaboration and consensual politics in democratic Chile as advanced by the successful Concertación coalition in four consecutive governments. In Carne de Perra, the mimicry of the transition regarding the Pinochet affair in 1998 helps to expose the contradictions of its collaborative logic. In the case of La Vida Doble, narrative ­self-­reflexivity not only reminds the reader of the artificiality of fictional representation of the past, but also of the complicity between official representations and the commodity value of traumatic memories in the present. Ultimately, these fictions of female collaboration offer examples of how ‘realist’ fictions – aware of their limitations – can successfully expose the production of gendered narratives of the past in their rewriting of the personal and collective historical t­ rauma.

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Chapter ­4

Daughters Rewriting Legacies in ‘El lugar del otro’ and ­Fuenzalida

In Chile, the daughters of those who experienced forced disappearance, imprisonment or political violence have been at the forefront of struggles over the past. This does not mean that mothers and other female figures have remained at the margins of the memory struggle.1 Yet, a close analysis of the role of women in this debate reveals the crucial role daughters of victims have played within the grassroots human right movements. This is particularly noticeable in the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Association of Family Members of the Disappeared, AFDD), the most prominent human rights organisation in Chile and the equivalent to Argentina’s Madres de Plaza de Mayo. Since its creation in 1977, the AFDD has had only three presidents, two of them daughters of disappeared militants of the Chilean Communist Party: Viviana Díaz (1999–2003) and Lorena Pizarro (2003 to present). The work of Díaz and Pizarro can only be described as fundamental in keeping memory alive. As Stern reminds us, in the late 1990s the memory question started to lose its cultural and strategic hold. Traditional leaders of memory narratives from the political spectrum had aged visibly, whereas by the turn of the century almost a third of the population was under fifteen years old (28.5 per cent). It is precisely around this time that Díaz and Pizarro started intervening in the debate over the traumatic past. With the decrease in constraints imposed over the judicial system by the end of the century, the risk of forgetting, especially among younger generations, was quite high in 1990s

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Chile. The situation demanded some action. The AFDD, under the guidance of Díaz and Pizarro, actively participated in the construction of a new memory framework in Chilean society. Stern calls it ‘memory as unfinished work’.2 Díaz’s acceptance speech, while receiving the National Prize for Human Rights in Chile (2011), highlights the tropes of this f­ ramework: Este premio es un reconocimiento a la labor que … hemos realizado durante todos estos años en la búsqueda de la Verdad y la Justicia, por la recuperación de la memoria histórica, por la reparación y porque NUNCA MÁS EN CHILE se vuelvan a violar los derechos ­humanos.3 This award is an acknowledgement to the work that … we have done all these years in search of Truth and Justice, for the recovery of historical memory, for reparations and so that NEVER AGAIN IN CHILE human rights are violated.

Díaz’s and Pizarro’s work eventually produced significant results. It was the pressure of the AFDD and other grassroots movements that led the Lagos administration to appoint a truth commission to investigate political imprisonment and torture, in September 2003. At the end of 2004, the report of the Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report) was published. Again, due to pressure from the AFDD the commission was reopened in 2005, and later in 2010, to produce new reports and add more cases. In March 2014, another daughter of those directly affected by the coup became the leader of the Chilean senate, the second most important authority in the country. Senator Isabel Allende’s ­swearing-­in ceremony became a significant moment for Chile’s recent past. In her first official speech, she remembered her deceased father, former president Salvador Allende, in the following terms: ‘quiero rendir un especial homenaje a mi padre y a todos aquellos que entregaron su vida, y a quienes lucharon por recuperar la democracia. Sé que él estaría orgulloso de ver a su hija en esta testera’, concluding that ‘la memoria histórica es necesaria e imborrable … debemos conocerla y reflexionar sobre lo que sucedió en nuestro país, para asumir con mayor certeza nuestro futuro’4 (‘I want to pay special homage to my father and all those that gave their lives, and those who fought for democracy. I know he would be proud of seeing his daughter in this place … historical

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memory is necessary and indelible … we must know about it and reflect on what happened in our country, in order to approach our future with greater conviction)’. For more than forty years, daughters in Chile have been one of the driving forces behind claims for state recognition, truth, justice and diverse forms of r­ eparations. Owing to the importance of the figure of the daughter in the memory struggle, this chapter will examine the tensions between memories of the first generation and the reformulation of memories of the ‘generation after’ in Pía Barros’s short story ‘El lugar del otro’ (2010) and Nona Fernández’s novel Fuenzalida (2012). There are a number of similarities between these texts within the context of the memory struggle: a structure of memorial transference between generations that relies upon the visual (photographs) and the performative (gestures, behaviours), an impulse to transform inherited memories, and the fact that they are both stories about absence within a context of political extermination. These texts portray intergenerational relations, mainly articulated around the figures of mothers and daughters, in the aftermath of violence. Also, they show how the daughter in both stories attempts to break free from the burden of a collective painful past, while at the same time finding a position in the present to deal with their personal traumas. The term ‘postmemory’ precisely explains the relationship between generations after collective traumatic experiences. Our understanding of the term is informed by Marianne Hirsch’s definition of ‘postmemory’ as ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before, to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images and behaviours among which they grew up’.5 These are experiences that, Hirsch points out, were transmitted so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.6 However, it is important to clarify that Hirsch’s use of the term postmemory mainly refers to what she calls the ‘second generation’, that is, children of Jews who survived the Holocaust in Europe. Strictly speaking, the figure of the ‘daughter of the dictatorship’ in the context of Chilean memory politics, and in the stories this chapter examines, do not belong to Hirsch’s definition of the second generation. Daughters such as Díaz, Pizarro or Allende were actually teenagers and young adults during the dictatorship. In the case of Luciana in ‘El lugar del otro’ and the d ­ aughter-­protagonist in Fuenzalida, it is better to

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describe these daughters as belonging to what Susan Rubin Suleiman labels the ‘1.5 generation’. This is the generation of child survivors or witnesses of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there during times of persecutions, imprisonment or annihilation.7 These different women are described under the expression ‘daughters of the dictatorship’ to highlight the fact that they can be viewed as generationally distinct from the main body of victims/perpetrators of the military regime and as heirs of burdensome memory narratives from the previous ­generation. This chapter will show how the daughters in both texts engage in a process of reformulation of their sense of kinship with, and reassessment of, the past through critical postmemorial practices. These strategies place them outside the framework of what Cecilia Sosa has called the ‘wounded family’, that is, people related by blood to the disappeared in p ­ ost-­dictatorial societies in Latin America.8 Considering the fact that the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, especially in Argentina and Chile, advanced discourses for the strengthening of the family at a national and private level, these daughters’ critical kinship reformulations appear as an ironic legacy of dictatorial r­ ule. ‘El lugar del otro’ depicts two interconnected stories of one Chilean family in the opposition movements to the military regime: first, the story of sisters Amalia and Mayra as witnesses/survivors of Pinochet’s secret detention centres and, second, the story of Luciana, a t­ wenty-­four-­year-­old woman who remembers her life in Australia and Argentina as the daughter of a Chilean couple in exile. In democratic Chile, Luciana meets her aunts Amalia and Mayra, and discovers Mayra is her biological mother. This encounter results in Mayra leaving, after unsuccessfully attempting to explain to her daughter why she was abandoned in the name of political commitment. The story depicts Luciana’s struggles with nostalgic, but also traumatic, memories of Chile and her strategies of resistance through a ‘critical’ postmemory of the first g ­ eneration. Postmemory adopts a different form in Fernández’s novel.9 The text focuses on the story of a daughter who remembers, and rewrites, the life of her disappeared father, Ernesto Fuenzalida. She is a successful television writer who accidentally finds a photograph of her long absent father in the garbage outside her house. This prompts her curiosity about the image’s origin and its

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accompanying story. The novel is divided into five parts. The second and fourth parts tell the story of Ernesto Fuenzalida and his disappearance during the dictatorship. At the end of the novel, the reader discovers these parts form a draft of a text written by Fuenzalida’s daughter: for a novel, or episodes of a political drama for television, or a screenplay for a film. The draft, then, can be read as the ‘postmemorial work’ of the daughter, attempting to rewrite the figure of her absent father, but with a different aesthetic and purpose to ‘El lugar del otro’. By rewriting dictatorial Chile through ­tongue-­in-­cheek references to popular culture consumed in the 1980s (martial arts films, action heroes), the narrator-­ protagonist finds a way to contest the memory discourses inherited from the first generation and the sanctity attached to the figure of the ‘disappeared’ father during the d ­ ictatorship. This chapter is divided into four sections. The first part will discuss the interactions between daughter and mothers and the processes of an intergenerational transference of memories that in both texts are the source of conflict between memory and postmemory. It will explain how their mothers’ silence and nostalgia shape these daughters’ postmemories. The second section will focus on the function of photographs in the texts as another medium for the transfer of memory between generations. In particular, it will be shown how the daughters in both texts use the ­image-­content and materiality of the photographs to critically ­re-­frame the past. The third section will explore the possibility of talking about the past in ­post-­dictatorial Chile through reformulating kinship relations. Both daughters adjust their familial connections to find a position from which to revisit the past, thereby deflating the burden of collective trauma that threatens their processes of identity-­formation. The final part will focus on the particular postmemorial work the daughters embark on to reassess national and personal traumas. It will be demonstrated how the daughter in Barros’s text can only engage with the traumatic past by criticising the implied affective connection between generations that Hirsch calls fundamental to postmemory works. Finally, this chapter will end by showing how the daughter in Fuenzalida favours a parodic rewriting of the collective traumatic past, in order to expose the transference of memories and production of postmemories as n ­ on-­definite ­discourses.

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Inherited ­memories The trauma of the military regime produces similar responses in the mothers of both texts. Silence becomes their shared strategy in dealing with the past. Kaiser has argued in relation to the dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83) and its impact on the descendants of victims she has interviewed that ‘the past was present in the silences and that those silences in actuality “spoke”, and often quite loudly, transmitting memories through them’.10 I draw on Kaiser’s ideas in my approach to the mothers’ silences, since they provide a way of identifying the different versions of the past the mothers transfer to their d ­ aughters. The mother in ‘El lugar del otro’, for instance, does not speak about the past: she only yearns for her country while in exile. Luciana, who left Chile as a child and does not remember the country at all, is not immune to her mother’s attitude. Consequently, her memories of her childhood in exile are shaped by her mother’s silent attachment to the past. For example, when receiving information about the release of her aunt Mayra, imprisoned in Brazil, an event with unexpected consequences for Luciana’s life, she remembers her mother’s r­ eactions: Cuando llegó el telegrama, mamá se escondió en su cuarto y se negó a decirnos algo. Con Beto nos reímos de esas costumbres de exiliados de mandarse telegramas, como si Internet no existiera o no fuera de confiar. Durante meses el timbre la hacía dar brincos, poco a poco se fue calmando y todo volvió a la normalidad, si es que algo podía llamarse normal en nuestras ­v idas.11 When we received the telegram, mum hid in her room and refused to tell us anything. Beto and I used to laugh about the habits of exiles, sending telegrams to each other, like the Internet didn’t exist or it was untrustworthy. For months, the doorbell made her jump, slowly she started to relax and everything returned to normal, if you could call anything normal in our l­ ives.

There are several important details in the above quotation regarding the transfer of memories between generations. The most evident is the mother’s reaction, shaped by silence about painful events. For Luciana, the telegram is irrelevant in terms of content, but its form reveals the first generation’s difficulty in moving on from the past. They remain attached to a dated form of

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communication that is no longer useful for the younger generation. It becomes a matter of mockery. The use of the telegram foregrounds the importance of form to the ways those who directly experienced dictatorial rule and violence remember and transmit memory. The medium of the message is as important as what they remember and transmit to their children. In the above quotation, the telegram also shows how a particular community, the Chilean exiles, and their ‘habits’ are shaped by their fears and need for secrecy about the past. These mannerisms directly influence Luciana’s attitude towards the past and its formative effect on her ­identity. Luciana recalls growing up in a family where secrecy defines family relationships and their treatment of the past. An important rite of passage for her, the death of her father, is clearly recalled by Luciana with an emphasis on the aforementioned attitudes of her ­mother: Tras esa puerta, los susurros y las despedidas se confundían con las instrucciones. Sólo escuché palabras aisladas, ‘decírselo’, ‘perdón’, ‘Benita’, y otros nombres que no pude ni quise dilucidar, porque algo empezó a apretarme la garganta con el paso de las ­horas.12 Behind that door, whispers and goodbyes were mixed up with instructions. I only heard the odd word, ‘tell her’, ‘sorry’, ‘Benita’, and other names that I could not and did not want to figure out, because something started to tighten my throat after a few ­hours.

The way in which the traumatic past and present collide in this scene only accentuates the notion that, for the mother, traumatic experiences, collective or individual, are better silenced for the greater good of the family. The mother’s attitude becomes an example of what Steve Stern labels ‘memory as a closed box’ put forward by the transitional governments in p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chile.13 In short, after irruptions of memory and commotion, discretion and negotiation deflated demands for expressions of truth and justice.14 In this context, the daughter in ‘El lugar del otro’ can only capture bits and pieces of the past, like a few words behind closed doors. Moreover, the mother becomes the embodiment of strategic silence, which shapes her daughter’s identity and postmemory. It is not accidental that the mother starts behaving in a way that is completely unfamiliar to Luciana, following the family’s return to democratic Chile: laughing, wearing ­make-­up, singing, watching

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TV and cooking traditional Chilean dishes.15 In other words, these actions mark her performance of the role of mother in a reconciled and happy Chilean f­ amily. The interactions between mother and daughter regarding the past are also shaped by familial secrecy in Fuenzalida. Again, this is suggested through the actions of the mother. An early example occurs when the daughter asks her mother about the photograph she has found of her disappeared father, Fuenzalida. The mother’s attitude shows a particular way of sharing information about the past in ­post-­dictatorial ­Chile: Estoy con mi madre en su casa. Le he traído la fotografía para ver qué me puede decir, pero se ha dedicado a mirarla en silencio. Yo he preparado el té en su cocina, he tostado pan, he puesto la mesa, incluso le he respondido un par de llamadas telefónicas a números equivocados, y ella sigue en lo ­mismo.16 I’m with my mother at her home. I have brought her the picture to see what she can tell me, but she has just stared at it in silence. I have made some tea in her kitchen, toasted some bread, set the table, I have even responded to a couple of wrong numbers, and she just carries on the ­same.

There is an important contrast in this scene between the mother’s quiet, absorbed attitude and her daughter’s active presence in the room. The natural flow of daily life, this scene suggests, falters for a moment for those witnesses of the first generation when the past suddenly irrupts in the present. In fact, communication fails between generations when the past irrupts, as is indicated when the daughter answers a couple of phone calls looking for the wrong number in front of her mother. The interminable silence of the woman bears witness to the buried past: Fuenzalida’s ‘disappearance’ and the military dictatorship. And yet, the n ­ arrator-­protagonist is wary of her mother’s silences. That is why she later ponders, ‘Me pregunto si ella responde en serio mis preguntas sobre Fuenzalida o si su amnesia constante es parte de una manda secreta que le impide entregarme información’17 (‘I wonder if she answers my questions about Fuenzalida seriously or if her permanent amnesia is part of a secret vow that prevents her from giving me information’). As with Luciana, the daughter in Fuenzalida is not immune to her mother’s own confrontation with the past. She internalises this behaviour, which in turn influences her sense of self and her particular memories of painful e­ xperiences.

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These daughters resist their mothers’ attitudes towards the past, but their particular memories are transferred to them. This happens because both mothers embrace specific memory narratives, which are emblematic of particular groups. In Barros’s text, for example, the mother is keen to emphasise a particular memory produced by the exiled Chilean community. Luciana recalls growing up in Australia listening to her mother explaining to her ‘cómo era “antes” [Chile]’18 (‘how [Chile] used to be’), watching her each September with exiled Chilean friends when ‘Se juntaban a desafinar canciones’19 (‘they got together to sing songs out of tune’) or hearing from outside ‘el sonido de las canciones de papá, escuchadas a todo volumen’20 (‘the sound of dad’s songs, listened at top volume’), when returning home. After Alberto’s death, the mother continues to transfer memories to her children in these particular ways. This is why, after leaving Australia for Argentina, Luciana understands her new life to be a repetition of the same mores and m ­ emories: la casa de Balcarce conservó la costumbre de las maletas, de los cuadros enrollados y los ‘por mientras’, esta vez aguardando por unos arrendatarios que no entregaban la casita de Grecia, que ahora era una calle en Chile donde mamá dijo que pertenecíamos.­21 The house in Balcarce kept up the habit of the suitcases, the rolled up prints and the ‘in the meantime’, this time waiting for some tenants to leave the house in Grecia, that was now a street in Chile where mum said we ­belonged.

The memories of the mother reveal her nostalgia. She also is unable to understand the deep impact of these memories and behaviours on her daughter’s identity. The mother keeps her luggage ready to return to Chile at all times and does not frame the prints she has gathered from trips and museums. This behaviour seeps into Luciana’s memory. Her recollections show her discomfort with her mother’s way of remembering a particular version of Chile. The mother repeatedly invokes Chile as a memory she shares with Luciana: ‘nuestro hogar’, ‘en casa’ or ‘[donde] perte­ necíamos’22 (‘our house’, ‘at home’, ‘[where] we belonged’). This produces tense negotiations of memory between mother and daughter. Everyday situations become examples of these familial ­transactions:

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[En Australia] nos íbamos a la biblioteca y aprendíamos a ser siux, pies negros, hindúes, congoleses, mayas o lo que fuera, llenando de mapas los muros de nuestro cuarto, riéndonos porque en el mapa de Estados Unidos había un pueblo que se llamaba así: Pueblo, porque sonaban extraños los sonidos de Mataquitos, porque mamá decía mal las palabras y ella nos corregía a nosotros un castellano que aquí se llamaba español y que fuimos olvidando en casa en una mezcla que a nuestros amigos los hacía enarcar las cejas y repreguntar a nosotros, cuando mamá gritaba al patio ‘La milky está lista, eat las onces’.­23 [In Australia] we used to go to the library and learn how to be Sioux, Blackfeet, Hindu, Congolese, Mayas or whatever, covering the walls of our room with maps, laughing because in the map of the United States there was a pueblo with that as its name: Pueblo, because the sounds of Mataquitos sounded strange, because mum’s pronunciation was bad and she taught us a Castilian that here was known as Spanish and we were forgetting at home by mixing up words that made our friends raise their eyebrows and ask us to repeat, when mum yelled to us in the back garden ‘the leche is ready, coman your snacks’.

It is significant how the children are able to learn and ‘embody’ different national and ethnic ‘roles’, in particular for school plays in Australia. This shows their adaptability, but also the fading importance of Chile as their country. Language, in the mother’s case, is a source of conflict. Spanish refuses to give its importance over to a foreign language, hence the mother’s mispronunciations of English or her hybrid utterances at the end of the quotation. This also emphasises the different forms of miscommunication that shape the relationships between the generations in the story. The mother’s attachment to Chile, her mother tongue and ultimately a particular image of a country that has become an almost utopic place, coalesce into an image that she is keen to transmit to her ­daughter. If nostalgia shapes one image of Chile in ‘El lugar del otro’, a different representation of Chile emerges in Fuenzalida. The daughter remembers, for instance, the last time she saw Fuenzalida one summer evening in the early 1980s. This happens when she is twelve years old, a few months after her arrival at a new home with her mother. The house is located two blocks from Santiago’s National Stadium, one of the first l­ arge-­scale political prisons to be used after the coup. The house is comfortable and pleasant for

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both mother and daughter. The neighbourhood is quiet, and the backyard of the house has been recently transformed with lemon trees, rose bushes and ivy. And yet the daughter’s attention is drawn towards a particular spot she remembers in this pleasant patio of her ­childhood: Atrás, en un rincón medio escondido, se asoma una gruta vacía. Está hecha de piedras y cemento y luego alojará a una Virgen. Mi madre todavía no sabe a cuál, pero cree que será una Virgen del Carmen. Solo tiene que hacerse el tiempo para ir a ­comprarla.24 In the back, in a half hidden corner, there is an empty grotto. It is made from stones and concrete and will eventually accommodate a Virgin. My mother did not know which one yet, but she believes it will be the Virgin of Mount Carmel. She just needs to find the time to go and buy ­her.

The reference to the grotto of the Virgin foregrounds a powerful symbol in patriarchal and dictatorial Chile. The importance of the Virgin for the regime has been widely discussed, especially the cult of the Virgen del Carmen. As María Elena Valenzuela has pointed out, from the beginning of Pinochet’s dictatorship, the model of the Virgin Mary was very useful for reinforcing passivity regarding injustice and discrimination, giving also legitimacy to political authoritarianism.25 Crucially, the daughter mentions a particular image of the Virgin associated with her mother, Our Lady of Carmel, venerated in Chile as Virgen del Carmen. During the Chilean War of Independence, General Bernardo O’Higgins, one of the country’s founding fathers, named her Protectress of Chile. Significantly, Pinochet’s regime proclaimed her Patroness of the Chilean Armed Forces soon after the coup and provided the funds to finish the construction of a national shrine begun 156 years earlier (a symbolic gesture that can be understood as a way of legitimising the regime).26 The daughter’s recollection of this detail in her home is particularly evocative of the gendered discourses that frame women in the text. The scene shows how the mother creates particular conditions for the upbringing of her daughter. She brings her up to follow the values and norms sanctioned by the authorities: faith, order and silence. Fuenzalida agrees with this model by repeatedly exclaiming that ‘El barrio es estupendo … Estupendo para la niña. Estupendo’27 (‘the neighbourhood is fantastic … fantastic for the girl. Fantastic’). Indeed, the proximity

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of a centre of political detention, a grotto dedicated to the Virgin and a pleasant house ‘in proper order’ are powerful images for an idea of Chile under the military dictatorship. Traumatic events, the mother knows, are happening all around the country, but their existence is not spoken about in her home. It is this approach to memory in the present that the daughter aims to r­ eformulate. Yet, the silences and secrets of both mothers are not the only forms of mediation between generations in the texts. The past is also transferred through material objects that unexpectedly emerge in the present. Among these objects, photographs occupy a prominent position in both texts. The next section will discuss the daughters’ reception of the past through intimate, family photographs and the kind of postmemorial work that emerges from these objects in the ­present.

Family ­a lbums The postmemorial work of the daughters in ‘El lugar del otro’ and Fuenzalida is shaped by the recurrence of public and private photographs. These pictures emerge often in the narrative, always connected to individual and collective traumas in Chile. As visual records of the past, these images function as sources to confirm emotions and information for both women. Indeed, photographs that survive or record massive destruction, Hirsch has persuasively argued, play a key role in mediating the past between generations and shaping the postmemorial work of the descendants in the aftermath of war.28 This happens, Hirsch clarifies, for several reasons. Photographs are not only indexical of the object/subject in front of the lens. They are also iconic of the captured object/ subject, despite their flatness and ­t wo-­dimensionality. The combination of the indexical and the iconic in photographs makes them, Hirsch concludes, symbolic of something beyond the material object itself. In Hirsch’s examples, photographs of bare survival, murder and atrocities in concentration camps become symbolic of the Holocaust itself. This is particularly powerful when the second generation confronts family pictures of a lost, past world. Intimate photographs mediate the inter- and transgenerational transfer of memories and become symbols of the destroyed past, facilitating an act of affiliation (or affective connection) across ‘distance and

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difference’,29 and, through identification and projection, the production of postmemorial w ­ ork. In the Chilean context, Nelly Richard points out that the photograph as a material object played a crucial role in challenging the diverse ­ state-­ led practices of silencing individuals during the regime. The relatives of the disappeared, for instance, carried ‘¿Dónde están? placards’ with private photographs and ID images of their relatives, in order to exhibit and confirm their existence and absence from the family frame. ID images were incorporated into the works of artists (such as Virginia Errázuriz, Carlos Leppe and Eugenio Dittborn) as visual metaphors for the different oppressive practices performed on individual and collective bodies by the regime.30 Indeed, Richard points out how the many interventions of ID photographs (framing, dissection, classification and so on), done by several visual artists in the opposition, effectively produced visual metaphors evoking brutal practices of kidnapping, detention and capture carried out by agents of the State against Chilean dissidents and common citizens.31 Familial and artistic photographs focused on the body were used and produced by those who, like the texts’ characters, were directly affected by political violence or cultural repression. Photography allowed victims, relatives or artists to challenge official memory narratives and reframe the past not only from a personal perspective, but also from charged ideological positions. Given this context, the function of photographic images in Barros’s and Fernández’s texts accomplishes a very different purpose. The process of affiliation between the second and first generation through this medium is hindered by the way in which these images, as material objects, are received in each ­text. In ‘El lugar del otro’, the tension between Luciana and her parents, exposed by the photograph, turns on the representation of the past as a moment of extreme ideological conflict. The text highlights this conflict through descriptions of public photographs and of their use in the construction of memory narratives in ­post-­dictatorial Chile. In ‘El lugar del otro’, family images are intertwined with public images, when particular photographs are presented to Luciana. These presentations primarily occur in the many scraps of newspapers and photographs collected and alluded to throughout the story. In fact, newspapers are the text’s chief source of information about Luciana’s biological mother, Mayra.

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They inform the reader about her political activism during and after the dictatorship. The connection between Luciana, the traumatic past and Mayra is mediated by an archive of public and ­mass-­produced images. Actually, after Mayra’s disappearance, this is how the narrator reintroduces the character in the s­ tory: No la volvieron a ver sino hasta dos años más tarde, en la portada de los diarios: Estaba presa en Brasil, había un secuestro y una muerte pesándole sobre los hombros. Para entonces Benita se llamaba Luciana y aparecía junto a sus padres en la foto de pasaporte que los llevaría a ­Australia.32 They did not see her until two years later, on the front cover of the newspapers: she was in jail in Brazil, guilty of a kidnapping and a murder. By then Benita was called Luciana and she was next to her parents in a passport photograph heading to A ­ ustralia.

These are the images that shape Luciana’s postmemories. Through these public images, Luciana inherits a social discourse of political commitment she is not interested in reproducing. She receives not only images from the public archive, but also information about Mayra’s political affiliations and activities abroad (her participation in a kidnapping and the death of the victim in Brazil is one of the activities Luciana particularly mentions). In contrast, the official passport photo shows the new status of Luciana as she is sanctioned by the state: performing a family narrative in which the abandoned daughter finds a place in a new family. However, within the family the transmission of memory is also heavily influenced by dominant narratives of the past. Here, public images of Mayra are often accompanied by conversations that perpetuate a monolithic image of her political p ­ roject: [Mayra] Tenía un gesto amenazante con el puño en alto y un rictus determinado en la boca seria. En abril le pregunté a mi padre por qué guardaban tantos recortes de esa mujer, se inquietó, pero luego empezó a contarme todo como si fueran hazañas de una heroína mítica que luchaba por liberar a su ­pueblo.33 [Mayra] was making a menacing gesture with a raised fist and a grimace on her sombre face. In April I asked my father why they kept so many cuttings of that woman, this unsettled him, but then he started to tell me everything as if it was the story of a legendary heroine fighting for the freedom of her ­people.

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The meaning that Luciana retains from these pictures focuses on Mayra’s hand (the silent gesture of a raised fist), which is charged with political connotations. Yet, Luciana’s personal interest in this character does not receive satisfactory explanations from her father Alberto. Indeed, he reproduces a discourse in which the past follows a heroic narrative of radical political militancy. In other words, nostalgia emerges again, associated with public images that have been incorporated into the familial space; fragments of memory have become Mayra’s family album, which records her heroic deeds for the younger generation to absorb and e­ mulate. The materiality of these photographs also speaks to the memory narratives that Luciana rejects and aims to contest. The newspaper images of Mayra carry the marks of their manipulation: resized, framed and retouched to fit the conventions of the press. In fact, these photographs belong to a broader narrative of ideological conflict. Under Pinochet’s regime, the Chilean print media was mainly a duopoly controlled by El Mercurio’s conglomerate and the Consorcio Periodístico de Chile SA. (COPESA). Significantly, these consortia were owned by the Edwards34 and Picó families who actively supported the dictatorship.35 Indeed, as Kristin Sorensen has pointed out, through their main publications (the newspapers El Mercurio and La Tercera), they intentionally distorted factual information to demonise the political Left and sanitise the Right, and published false stories about the disappeared or victims of the repression.36 Within this context, Mayra’s photographic fashioning as a militant and a revolutionary become images that supplement the telling of stories from the point of view of a biased media. Events are turned into stories of terrorism and crime for the mass consumption of the Chilean public. Alberto manipulates the photographs in response to this dominant narrative. He cuts and reclaims these images to create a personal, but also ideologically loaded, family album that he is eager to pass on to Luciana, but which she ultimately rejects. Luciana realises the endless possibilities the manipulation of photographs brings to the narration of the past. Luciana rejects the incessant reframing of the past through photographs, images used (in newspapers) and reused (in personal albums) to narrate the period of the dictatorship from fixed ideological ­positions. In Fuenzalida, the reintroduction of the absent father and traumatic past into the daughter’s life in the present is also mediated by

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photographs. However, unlike Luciana the daughter in Fuenzalida only rediscovers photographs of her disappeared father in adulthood, when she is a single mother and a professional writer for television. The importance of photography for the narrator-­ protagonist is established at the beginning of the novel, since a Polaroid print brings to light the daughter’s memories of her disappeared ­father: Lo primero es una fotografía. Una polaroid vieja que se escapó de una de las bolsas de basura amontonadas en la mitad de la cuadra. Mezcla de papel, cenizas, latas de cerveza y colillas de cigarro sueltas. Un perro intruso rompió el plástico negro de un mordisco y la dejó caer al suelo, bajo la luz amarillenta de un f­ arol.37 The first thing is a photograph. An old polaroid that escaped from one of the many garbage bags piled up in the middle of the street. A mixture of paper, ashes, beer cans and cigarette butts. A dog bit open the black plastic bag and let it fall to the ground, under the yellow light of a l­ amppost.

The opening of the novel echoes Hirsch’s comments about the significance of photographs as images that survive annihilation. Hirsch claims that ‘Whether they are family pictures of a destroyed world, or records of the process of its destruction, photographic images are fragmentary remnants that shape the cultural work of postmemory’.38 For Hirsch, this is important because the photographs’ symbolic power ultimately facilitates an affective connection between the object/subject in front of the lens and the viewer. It is significant that the daughter literally recovers this picture from destruction. The image has been downgraded to the category of waste by an unknown relative who, she assumes, is living in her neighbourhood. The material treatment of this photograph suggests the marginal value given to the daughter’s mementos from the past in p ­ost-­ dictatorial Chile. As Susan Sontag reminds us, Polaroid photographs are unique objects, similar to the prints produced by the daguerreotype.39 Polaroid images are memories produced in the immediate aftermath of the event they capture. In fact, Polaroid cameras automated all aspects of p ­ icture-­t aking, removing from the camera operator all technical requirements except the selection and framing of the subject matter, since they produce a single, unique print.40 The expertise and gaze of the professional photographer was to a

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certain extent challenged by this new technology. This allowed the appearance of amateur ‘gazes’ to capture and produce images of the world for posterity. Significantly, the daughter recalls that she was the operator of the Polaroid camera as a ten-­ ­ year-­ old girl. The Polaroid photograph she sees when the novel opens is the product of her decision to capture a personal moment. Her gaze produces a quick, yet valuable object: an intimate image of her past under dictatorship. Her memory is reinforced by a blurred message written in childish handwriting on the back of the photograph that reads, the daughter only recognises, the word ‘Fuenzalida’. The consequence of discarding and recovering the Polaroid image is to establish a tension from the beginning of the novel between the daughter’s efforts to frame the past and the first generation’s resistance to this process through their obliteration of mementos. The text suggests, then, that kinship becomes a problem when the daughter frames the past, since the hierarchy of familial relations removes the products of her gaze from any recognised memory struggle within the country. The only solution the daughter seems to find is to embark on a process of kinship reformation to revisit and rewrite the traumatic ­past.

Daughters of the d ­ ictatorship During the 2013 presidential elections, Bachelet raced against another daughter of those directly implicated in Chile’s recent past: r­ight-­ w ing bloc candidate Evelyn Matthei, daughter of a member of the military junta, Air Force General Fernando Matthei.41 Commemorations for the fortieth anniversary of the coup took place in the middle of the presidential race. Predictably, both candidates remained attached to particular memory narratives of the traumatic past. Bachelet’s speeches emphasised conventional tropes of the Chilean transition: the coup’s trauma and the need for reconciliation.42 Matthei’s declarations to the press seemed to go in a similar direction, but at the same time foregrounded the coup as a consequence of the violent polarisation of the country during Allende’s administration.43 In a public statement after the official state ceremony of commemoration hosted by president Piñera, Matthei condemned the use of

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violence and human rights violations, but only in ‘general terms’ and without referring to the military regime.44 In the weeks prior to the ceremony, a period marked by an explosion of television programmes, articles and essays reassessing the coup, the general public was particularly attentive to any gestures from Matthei related to the military regime. She had ardently defended Pinochet after his arrest in London in 1998 and only distanced herself from the General, as the majority of the ­r ight-­w ing coalition did, after the 2002 discovery of Pinochet’s money laundering in the Riggs Bank. She confirmed discourses of collective exculpation (of the sector that helped Pinochet to rule) by alluding to her personal history, declaring that ‘los sectores no piden perdón … yo tenía veinte años cuando ocurrió el golpe, no tengo nada que pedir perdón’45 (‘parties do not make apologies … I was twenty years old when the coup happened, I don’t have anything to apologise for’). As the candidate of the r­ight-­ w ing bloc, her statement became a clear sign to the Chilean electorate of her position regarding the traumatic past: at once negating the consequences of seventeen years of dictatorial rule, supported by her political coalition and distancing herself from this contentious ­past. In the light of these particular kinship and memory narratives by two influential ‘daughters of the dictatorship’ in Chilean politics, I examine the kinship position of both main characters, and their relationship with the past. The analysis shows that an anxiety regarding kinship relationships between generations permeates these works. In ‘El lugar del otro’, for instance, Luciana grows up believing she is the biological daughter of Chilean exiles. She struggles to integrate this fact into her identity. For her, emancipation is only possible when she rejects the burden of her parents’ nostalgic memories of Chile. The climax of this story involves Luciana’s meeting with her biological mother Mayra. In Fuenzalida, kinship anxieties irrupt when the d ­ aughter-­protagonist must deal with both her son’s mysterious accident and the discovery of a photograph of her father. Both events force the daughter to think about her kinship with a ‘disappeared’ father in p ­ ost-­dictatorial Chile. In both texts, the daughters redefine their sense of kinship within their families. This redefinition is a response to their struggle to accept certain memories (and to uncover others), as discussed in the above ­sections.

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In ‘El lugar del otro’, Luciana disrupts the family’s sense of biological kinship. Biological disjunction becomes a metaphor for the problematic interactions and tense transfer of memories within the family. However, this does not mean that the story supports dated ideas, as Linda Stone clarifies, that people are linked together only through biological ties.46 In fact, as Cecilia Sosa has demonstrated in the Argentinian ­post-­dictatorial context, new acts of mourning from beyond the biological framework have emerged that challenge the dominant idea that only the relatives of those directly affected by dictatorial violence, the ‘wounded family’, are entitled to perform acts of public engagement with the past, trauma and loss.47 Ana Amado has shown that many memorial actions and interventions of Madres, Abuelas or H.I.J.O.S. emphasise the physical similarities between relatives and the disappeared, confirming Sosa’s observations regarding the ‘wounded family’ framework in ­post-­dictatorial Argentina.48 In this sense, Luciana’s phenotypic dissimilarity from the rest of her family prefigures her escape from the burden of ‘the wounded family’ framework after violence: the cult of the victim, nostalgia for Chile and, particularly, an attachment to the figure of Mayra. This is demonstrated when Amalia and Mayra finally arrive in Chile, reuniting the family for the first ­t ime: ‘Eres igual a tu padre’, y Beto diciendo, ‘Mi hermana es la menos parecida, tiene el pelo negro y rizado y la piel blanca leche, no se parece a mamá, ni a papá . . . y mamá, dinos a quién sacó los ojos pardos’ bromeando en una chanza conocida que esa vez nadie festeja y el silencio duro, roto solo por los bocinazos y frenadas, parece incrustárseles en la piel abrasada de ­calor.49 ‘You’re just like your father’, and Beto saying, ‘my sister is the least similar, she has black curly hair and milk white skin, she does not look like mum, or dad … and mum, tell us where she got those brown eyes from’ telling an old joke that this time no one celebrated and the hard silence, broken only by cars honking their horns and stopping suddenly, seems to absorb into their burning s­ kin.

Luciana is part of the family, but at the same time her position is uncertain. By highlighting Luciana’s physical differences, Barros places her in a position where she can contest not only her locus within the family, but more importantly the nostalgic memories of her relatives. This is clear for the first generation in the previous

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quotation. That is why a ‘hard silence’ is the appropriated response to Luciana’s physical dissimilarity highlighted by Beto. This uncomfortable silence clearly becomes a symbol of the collective silence as strategy when dealing with any disruption to dominant narratives of the traumatic past. The above passage seems to suggest that the power and perpetuation of collective memory narratives is based upon a community of individuals united by similarities. In other words, difference between members would hinder the legitimacy of these n ­ arratives. In Fuenzalida, the daughter’s sense of kinship is also foregrounded through her phenotype. In Chile, her physical appearance separates her from the rest of the population. She does not share the features of ­fellow-­countrymen and women. She is a tall, thin, ­fair-­skinned, redhead. From this perspective, she is isolated from the Chilean ‘family’. This situation mirrors her isolation from Fuenzalida’s life. From her position outside the family, a position paralleled by Luciana in ‘El lugar del otro’, the daughter speculates about her kinship and her efforts to rewrite inherited memories. Fuenzalida is her ‘disappeared’ father, but her whole patrilineal line is absent, which shapes her i­ dentity: Tengo hermanos Fuenzalida, pero nunca supe cómo eran. Los ima­ ginaba colorines, flacos y altos. Una vez escuché que me parecía a uno de ellos, pero Fuenzalida no me lo confirmó. Otra vez escuché que otro de ellos trabajaba en la montaña, que era socorrista andino, pero Fuenzalida tampoco me lo confirmó. No sé nada de los abuelos Fuenzalida. Desconozco sus ­nombres. 50 I have brothers Fuenzalida, but I never knew what they were like. I imagined them being redheaded, lean and tall. I once heard I looked like one of them, but Fuenzalida never confirmed that. Another time I heard one of them worked up in the mountain range, that he was a member of the ski patrol, but Fuenzalida did not confirm that either. I know nothing about the Fuenzalida grandparents. I do not know their ­names.

The daughter’s sense of kinship is not entirely secure. She struggles to anchor her existence within a particular family frame: either in the Chilean nation or in her biological family. That is why she is only able to ‘hear’ about her siblings or ‘imagine’ them in a particular fashion, as represented by their physical features: redheaded, lean and tall. But these features and images are pure

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speculation. Uncertainty, as in Luciana’s case in ‘El lugar del otro’, shapes her position in relation to her patrilineal line and her inheritance of m ­ emories. The father’s silence in these family matters suggests a general reticence towards the past from the point of view of the daughter. This ­ill-­defined sense of kinship, among other elements, shapes the daughter’s rewriting of Fuenzalida’s disappearance. It also makes it difficult for the n ­ arrator-­protagonist to connect emotionally with her inconvenient past. Imagination and fictional writing, consequently, play key roles in the daughter’s rewriting of personal and collective traumatic memories transferred to her. Not surprisingly, she incorporates kinship imagery into her scripts for television. For instance, one of her most successful soap operas (a series called Unidad de Urgencias) tells the story of a tall, thin, redheaded female doctor who could not save the life of her irresponsible father and has to deal with the appearance of a whole family of tall, redheaded relatives. She derives her fixation on these features from Fuenzalida’s appearance, which she describes, emphasising particular ­qualities: Era alto, tenía un cuerpo relativamente delgado, con una postura firme y atlética. Su pelo era dócil y algo canoso, con un pasado colorín. Todo el mundo decía que era idéntico a Charles Bronson, que aunque no era actor de películas de artes marciales, igual era actor de películas de acción. Ocupaba un bigote grueso como el de Charles Bronson. Sus ojos eran verdes y algo rasgados, como los de Charles Bronson. Su sonrisa era perfecta y en ella destacaba una corona metálica y b ­ rillante. 51 He was tall, he had a relatively thin body, with a firm and athletic posture. His hair was neat and greyish, with a ginger past. Everybody used to say he was identical to Charles Bronson, who, although he was not an actor of ­martial-­arts films, was an actor of action films. He had a thick moustache like Charles Bronson’s. His eyes were green and a­ lmond-­shaped, like Charles Bronson’s. His smile was perfect and in it a shiny, bright crown stood o ­ ut.

The daughter is comfortable with this description of Fuenzalida, but not as a model for her kinship. It serves a purpose, only insofar as it allows her to rewrite inherited memories for television and make public her private sphere. Charles Bronson implies an image of her father that is useful for the story she wants to tell. This does

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not mean she sees her absent father as an ‘action hero’. The ­action-­hero type is valuable within the logic of television and entertainment. This is reinforced in the following chapters through her references to another hero of popular culture who shapes Fuenzalida’s representation, Bruce Lee. The daughter does not want (or is unable) to tell the story of Fuenzalida’s disappearance from the perspective of her own life. Fuenzalida’s story does not fit the formula for successful writing for television, which requires ‘Amor, Venganza, Muerte y Cabro Chico’52 (‘love, revenge, death and a little boy’). After all, Fuenzalida’s disappearance from her life is neither heroic nor political. He leaves her and her mother to return to live with his wife and children, ‘disappearing’ for the rest of her life. When she rewrites memories in contemporary Chile, they demand the television model: the story of the traumatic past as a battle between good and evil, with violence, love and a happy ­ending. Placed in these unstable familial positions, the main characters in ‘El lugar del otro’ and Fuenzalida engage in a process of redefinition of kinship. In this sense, it is interesting to note Luciana’s more fluid sense of kinship and memory, beyond the ties of blood, while living in exile. She attempts to connect with other transnational traumatic experiences, without the burden of nostalgia. This takes place primarily while living in Buenos Aires. A telling example of this affective connection happens in one of the landmarks of the Argentinean capital, the Gran Café T ­ ortoni: Mientras miraba con los ojos secos a ninguna parte, descubrí que era observada por una mujer delgadísima y de manos cuidadas. Bebimos el café mirándonos, ella desde su vida octogenaria, yo con mis quince recién estrenados. Antes del último sorbo, a tres mesas la una de la otra, rompimos a llorar. Fue mi primera amiga verdadera, se llamaba Lenka, era judía y tenía todos los exilios en la p ­ iel.53 While I was staring with dry eyes into nowhere, I realised a very thin woman with ­well-­looked after hands was watching me. We drank our coffee watching each other, her in her eighties, me only recently turned fifteen. Before the last sip, three tables from each other, we started crying. She was my first real friend, her name was Lenka, she was Jewish and she had exiles in her D ­ NA.

An idea of kinship rooted only in blood ties, Luciana seems to realise through her friendship with Lenka, becomes a burden for

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the new generations. This is especially the case when there are tense negotiations between the nostalgic memories of the Chilean exile community and the postmemories of their descendants. This situation takes place in Buenos Aires and coincides with other memory processes. Luciana’s family arrives in the capital during President Raúl Alfonsín’s democratic government. The city provides the characters with a ­ post-­ dictatorial setting where tensions between public and private memory processes begin to emerge in the aftermath of violence. In fact, President Alfonsín was more proactive in implementing policies regarding the armed forces and past atrocities than his Chilean counterpart, President Aylwin. Luciana and her family arrive in Buenos Aires just as Alfonsín is passing a number of crucial bills: the annulment of the amnesty law, the prosecution of all members of the military regime and the creation of the Comisión Nacional sobre Desaparición de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, CONADEP).54 In this context, the Café Tortoni is also significant for Luciana’s postmemorial process. As the oldest café in the capital, and a landmark of Buenos Aires’s rich cultural life, the Tortoni is both a place where Buenos Aires’s memory is alive for Luciana, and also a site of transience due to its touristic status.55 In this place, memory and impermanence are entangled, which facilitates Luciana’s process of transgenerational affiliation with the old Jewish woman. Before becoming the ‘guardians’ of a traumatic personal and collective past in the aftermath of catastrophe, Luciana suggests, descendants reclaim their right to deal with the profound sense of uprooting derived from a nomadic existence that they did not chose. Indeed, Luciana later confirms these ­opinions: Si algo nos habían legado sin siquiera saberlo, era El lugar del otro, y me pregunté si la mujer del pelo blanco que decía era mi madre, conocería ese lugar del otro, el lugar del hombre muerto tras el secuestro fallido, los hijos del otro, las rutinas del otro, el vacío en la mesa y en la cama que dejó tras su ‘ejecución’.­56 If something was inherited to us without knowing, it was the other’s place, and I asked myself if the woman with white hair that called herself my mother, would know the other’s place, the place of the dead man after the failed kidnapping, the children of the other, the routines of the other, the empty space at the dinner table and in the bed that he left after his ‘execution’.

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By exclaiming ‘El lugar del otro’, Luciana voices her own feelings of kinship, as removed from her family and the community of Chilean exiles. Empathy for the other are favoured over dated ideas regarding political and ideological action. Luciana unequivocally subscribes to these values. Besides, her attitude calls attention to the way in which ‘other’ daughters of the dictatorship internalise and respond to the memories handed down to them (Bachelet, Matthei). In different forms, Luciana reformulates her kinship, challenging the specific memory narratives of her parents that, the text suggests, figures such as Bachelet or Matthei are incapable of ­subverting. On the other hand, what emerges in Fuenzalida is a different approach to ideas of kinship and affiliation between different generations. If silence regarding the figure of her father shapes the daughter’s sense of kinship, his traumatic disappearance during the dictatorship also plays a key role in this process. Fuenzalida’s vanishing turns the daughter’s idea of a typical Chilean family (mother, daughter and Fuenzalida) into a typical example of a ‘wounded family’ during dictatorial rule (devastated mother, puzzled daughter and disappeared father). Fernández seems to present the daughter’s story as a narrative of the ‘wounded family’, the searching for truth by one of the members of the existing bloodline chain of relatives of the disappeared. Certainly, like thousands of relatives of the disappeared, the daughter has lost her father during the dictatorship and only owns a few blurry photographs of him. Moreover, her story is chiefly concerned with the discovery of Fuenzalida’s unknown location and the truth behind his disappearance after years of silence, mystery and secrecy. The traumatic past is also depicted as a disruptive force that suddenly emerges in the present for those directly touched by the tragedy of loss, producing shared affect between family members such as confusion, rage or bewilderment. Yet, the framework of the ‘wounded family’ is exposed as an easily manipulated discourse of kinship in democratic Chile, a category that can serve multiple purposes in the present. In this sense, Fuenzalida seems to construct a ‘wounded family’ narrative only to show its provisional status as a system of social relations in mourning the past. The daughter achieves this exposure through a playful postmemorial act of a­ ffiliation. Progressively, the reader realises that Fuenzalida disappeared during the dictatorship, not due to the dictatorship. The difference

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is significant. His disappearance, the daughter later acknowledges, was a family matter, not a political o ­ ne: Mis escasos momentos con él tienen la forma de una fotografía cortada con una tijera. No hay mucho de qué hablar. Una historia sin desarrollo, sin final. Solo el punto de partida, los primeros diez capítulos del culebrón. Fuenzalida desapareció. Se borró del mapa, se echó al pollo, se fue, llevándose con él todos nuestros ­minirratos. 57 My rare moments with him are shaped like a photograph cut out with scissors. There is not much to say. A story without plot, without ending. Only the beginning, the first ten chapters of a soap opera. Fuenzalida disappeared. He ran off, disappeared without a trace, vanished into thin air, did a runner, taking with him all our brief ­moments.

Moreover, the only image the daughter has of her ‘disappeared’ father shows him wearing a black kimono, smiling, performing a typical stance of karate, surrounded by images of Chinese ideograms and dragons.58 When compared with the photographs that the relatives of the disappeared carry with them on public marches and ceremonies, Fuenzalida’s extravagant picture becomes a sign of the daughter’s unusual position within the framework of those affected by violence. With the materials available to her, she is unable to be a ‘family member’, a daughter directly touched by dictatorial rule. Yet the daughter needs to find a ‘family’ where the narration of her personal trauma can be voiced. The daughter finds this kinship through an affiliative postmemorial act. She will rewrite her father’s disappearance from her life during the dictatorship as a story of dictatorial violence and loss, more closely related to the experiences of the ‘wounded family’. In doing so, she initially seems to adopt and perpetuate the tropes of grief and loss of the wounded rather uncritically. Yet her reformation of kinship relations and her approach to discourses of those touched by dictatorial violence become playful acts of representation. She rewrites the story of Fuenzalida’s disappearance as a ­martial-­arts adventure, a quest of a man against evil agents of the regime in order to save the life of his little son. To some extent, the perspective of the wounded is initially adopted to voice the trauma of disappearance by dictatorial violence, only to establish its distance from the sanctity attached to such acts of m ­ ourning.

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Rewriting ­legacies Alison Landsberg has persuasively argued that the arrival of modern technologies of mass culture has reshaped the role of memory in our societies. This happens because these technologies create situations in which individuals might be affected by memories of events they did not live though. For example, cinema and commodified mass culture have made possible, in Landsberg’s opinion, an unprecedented circulation of images and narratives about the past. The result has been a new form of public cultural memory, one born out of the interface between a person and a historical narrative at experiential sites such as cinemas or museums. Landsberg labels this new form of memory ‘prosthetic memory’. This type of memory is deeply felt by the person (regardless of skin colour, ethnic background or biology) and shapes his or her subjectivity and politics.59 Landsberg is optimistic about the productivity of prosthetic memories in the context of mass culture and capitalism. She argues that the production of these new forms of memory facilitates social change. It also transforms relationships with historical traumatic events. Produced by technologies of mass culture, these memories form subjectivities that are not entirely ‘natural’. For Landsberg, this has political consequences since, by creating ­ non-­ essentialist identities through artificial memories, people might take political action despite their lack of direct connection to the traumatic historical experience remembered. Prosthetic memories, like prosthetic limbs, feel real for the person and prompt changes in her or his subjectivity and political identity.60 The daughters in ‘El lugar del otro’ and Fuenzalida develop strategies for either unloading the burden of the past or critically rewriting the legacies handed down to them. Both texts incorporate images that draw on products of mass culture and, in particular, films. To some extent, both texts engage with the consumption of prosthetic memories, but the purposes behind these operations in both texts are more specific than the ones put forward by Landsberg. The production/consumption of prosthetic memories in both texts facilitates a critical perspective towards transferred memories. By doing so, they effectively challenge memory discourses of the first ­generation. For example, in ‘El lugar del otro’, Luciana’s postmemorial answer to the intergenerational transfer of memories draws upon

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specific gestures she appropriates for the purpose of desacralising the traumatic past and the burden of its transmission. In particular, she appropriates Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the ­Extra-­Terrestrial (ET) in a classroom in her new Australian school after leaving Chile with her family, which becomes the experiential site of ­connection: En el Tram, allá lejos, había empezado nuestro código, al volver aún llorosos de clases, luego de que Miss Bellamy llevara la película ET, como un modo de hacer más ágil nuestra semana colegial de integración. Nos fuimos muy apegados a casa y tomé de la mano a Beto con firmeza durante el breve trayecto a pie de la parada a nuestra puerta. Kerum llevaba a Ammia también fuertemente cogida. Al pasar junto a nuestra puerta, levantaron el índice hacia la estrella imaginada y mirándonos, dijeron ‘Home’, tratando de bromear ante el sonido de las canciones de papá, escuchadas a todo volumen. Desde entonces, mudos, nuestro dedo era una complicidad alzada hacia las nostalgias sin desafío.­61 In the Tram, far away, our [secret] code had started, returning from school still in tears, after Miss Bellamy brought the movie ET, as a way of making the school’s induction week easier. We went home and I clenched Beto’s hand during the brief walk from the bus stop to our door. Kerum took Ammia’s hand firmly too. Walking by our door, they raised their index finger towards the imaginary star and, staring at us, they said ‘Home’, trying to make jokes because of Dad’s songs, which could be heard loudly. Since then, mute, our index finger was a raised [gesture] of mutual understanding towards unchallenged ­nostalgias.

This is a ‘teasing’ act of affiliation in the story. The film ET shows a dramatic experience that resonates with Luciana and her friends (exile and uprooting), hence the watery eyes she mentions in the above quotation. Initially, the children seem to internalise ET’s experience. The alien’s situation becomes Landsberg’s prosthetic memory: irrespective of skin colour, ethnic background or biology and across chasms of difference. However, the daughters challenge, rather than share, the traumatic experiences of their parents by ­re-­enacting one of the most memorable moments in the film. The gesture becomes an index of this generation’s dissatisfaction with the weight of the past, a challenge directed at the sanctity of memory. This finger in the air deflates the mediation of traumatic events, nostalgic images of the past and the burden of harrowing experiences. Luciana’s repetition of ET’s sign complicates

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Landsberg’s claims for the usefulness of prosthetic memories in the production of unexpected alliances between individuals across time and space (Luciana and her parents). Instead of embracing the raised fist of those involved in the social revolution and fight against oppression (the first generation), the daughter raises a comic gesture, an impertinent finger to the p ­ ast. Therefore, memory and postmemory in ‘El lugar del otro’ do not cohere in the ways Hirsch describes. The transfer of memory appears to be a threat to Luciana’s identity and, by extension, to those women related to victims of human rights violations, but not directly affected by dictatorial violence in Latin American ­post-­dictatorial societies. This is why Luciana ­claims: Somos de colores, pero no de los colores que pretenden, tomamos partido, pero ya no esos partidos, otros, de los que desertamos apenas empiezan los manifiestos y las reglas. Sentí lástima por la ‘aguerrida’, lástima por sus diez minutos ininterrumpidos de perorata que intentaba justificar abandonos y ­muertes.62 We are of [different] colours, but not the colours they want, we take sides, but not those sides anymore, other ones, that we abandon as soon as manifestoes and rules start. I felt sorry for the ‘brave’, sorry for the ten uninterrupted minutes of her boring speech that tried to justify neglect and ­deaths.

The transfer of memories is a process that hinders the new generation’s search for new meanings about the past and identity formations. Postmemory offers such a possibility only if it is able to break free from a stagnant idea of remembrance (nostalgia). This is foregrounded in the story through the inverse errant condition of Barros’s characters. Mayra remains ‘incarcerated’, even after her release from prison, and rarely leaves the house. Luciana’s itinerancy is shown in her trips to Australia, Argentina, Chile and Spain as a young adult, where she is always meeting new people. Luciana’s reception of her mother’s memories lacks Hirsch’s affective and affiliative connections. The only conversation to occur between Luciana and Mayra clarifies this point. Significantly, when Luciana arrives, Mayra announces her departure from home and family. She will do this, Mayra explains, in order to become the new custodian of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Solidarity Museum Salvador Allende, MSSA).63 According to her, this is the final order she has received from the party and will be

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her way of continuing her political work. Ultimately, Mayra becomes part of the archive of images and objects from the past, akin to a museum piece (almost as a wax figure or a relic), the appropriate guardian of a memory narrative that has lost appeal for the new generations. An excess of inherited memories threatens the daughters’ identities. The memory of the traumatic past can be an overwhelming duty for the new generations. This is especially the case when this responsibility hinders (or is blind to) the identity formation of the second generation of daughters in the present. This is not to say that the past must be forgotten or silenced. But social memory also needs to remind itself how the past impacts the subjectivities of those that did not directly experience i­t. The purpose of prosthetic memories in Fuenzalida is also the product of a critical rewriting of the transmitted past, rather than an alliance between generations across time and space. The daughter r­e-­signifies elements from films (commodities of mass culture), but to scrutinise and question the conventions of traumatic narratives transferred to her generation. She attempts to rewrite the past, but is also s­elf-­conscious about this possibility, which is an element absent in Barros’s text. Certainly, the daughter is constantly foregrounding the conventions of her outputs for television. This narrative foregrounding informs the critical postmemorial work of the daughter. She is particularly open about the nature of her stories for television, especially after finding the photograph of her f­ ather: No importa qué tipo de culebrón sea el que escriba: comedias románticas, policiales, dramones, historias de vampiros, dramas sociales, históricos, políticos, hasta ahora todos han coincidido en el mismo patrón. Un patrón que contiene y dirige la historia: Amor, Venganza, Muerte y Cabro ­Chico.64 It does not matter what kind of soap opera I am writing: romantic comedies, police series, melodramas, vampire stories, social dramas, historical, political, so far all of them have followed the same structure. A structure that shapes the story: love, vengeance, death and a ­child.

Her approach to the reconstruction of the past, then, follows a successful narrative model for producing works for mass consumption. The diversity of stories that the daughter has created with the same structure suggests that postmemories can also be accommodated in this ­model.

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To rewrite Fuenzalida’s story, the daughter turns towards iconic figures and popular films during the dictatorship, specifically Bruce Lee and his most iconic film, Enter the Dragon (1973). Bruce Lee and his film help the daughter to introduce elements of her formula for successful television writing. In the film, Bruce Lee plays an exceptionally gifted martial artist named Lee, living in a Shaolin temple. At the request of the authorities, he enters a martial arts tournament in order to expose the illegal activities of the mob kingpin Han, also responsible for the death of Lee’s sister. The daughter also has a personal reason to draw on this film. One of her few memories of her father happens when she wakes in the middle of the night and finds him next to her, watching the ­film: La imagen me desconcertó porque desperté en medio de la noche y encontré la televisión de mi pieza encendida. A mi lado Fuenzalida observaba la pantalla concentrado. Estaba vestido sobre la cama, con los pies tapados con un chal a cuadrillé. Al parecer me ­cuidaba.65 The image unsettled me because I woke up in the middle of the night and found the television in my room turned on. Next to me Fuenzalida looked absorbed in the screen. He was fully clothed on top of the bed, his feet covered by a tartan shawl. Apparently, he was ­baby-­sitting ­me.

Significantly, the daughter does not remember the plot of the film. Instead, she vaguely recalls Fuenzalida’s summary of the plot. In Fuenzalida’s version, there are clear boundaries between the forces of good (Lee) and evil (Han). Fuenzalida blindly embraces the story and its vision of the world. The daughter also accepts this version of the story when she is a child. In the climax of the final battle between Lee and Han, prior to Han’s defeat, the daughter recalls that Fuenzalida ‘Parecía querer entrar a la pantalla, estaba dispuesto a vivir lo que la historia traería después’66 (‘seemed to want to go into the screen, he was willing to live through what the story would bring later’). But, as an adult, her rewriting of the past exaggerates these clear boundaries between good and evil within the context of the Chilean dictatorship. It is precisely by mocking these boundaries through martial arts heroes and ruthless villains that the daughter exposes the Manichean nature of transferred discourses of the past. In doing so, she finds the means to voice her personal loss, but without endorsing the sanctity attached to memory by those directly touched by dictatorial v­ iolence.

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The daughter uses the structure of martial arts films to rewrite Fuenzalida’s disappearance. A heroic figure, familial love and revenge emerge as her themes. According to the daughter, it is the appropriate way to remember him: ‘Si tuviera que recordarlo de alguna forma, creo que sería así … Como el héroe o el villano de una película de acción añeja’67 (‘If I had to remember him somehow, I believe that it would be like that … like the hero or the villain of a dated action film’). In the story she outlines, Ernesto Fuenzalida is an exceptional kung fu master and owner of an academy of martial arts in Santiago. Without knowing it, he ends up helping an escaped political prisoner. Fuenzalida defeats three agents of Pinochet’s secret police, who are attempting to recapture the prisoner. One of the agents is Luis Gutierrez Molina who works under the command of Lieutenant Fuentes Castro, another martial arts master. Fuenzalida’s technique impresses Fuentes Castro, who offers Fuenzalida a job training his agents. Fuenzalida refuses. Fuentes Castro, then, orders Gutierrez Molina to kidnap Fuenzalida’s son (Ernestito Fuenzalida), in order to force him to accept his offer. With the help of his friends, Li and Bustos, Fuenzalida masterminds a rescue plan. The draft ends with Fuenzalida’s attempt to rescue his son from Fuentes Castro’s secret compound at the foothills of the Andes, moments prior to the final battle between the two enemies. The daughter appropriates particular images of the dictatorship to rewrite the legacy of traumatic memories. The intended viewers of this production are the Chilean TV audience, eager to consume all kinds of stories. The daughter also highlights the process of transferring images of the traumatic past and their strategic function within official memory narratives. She does this by presenting the story of Fuenzalida’s disappearance as a battle between good and evil, a narrative of the traumatic past that has value as a commodity in the entertainment industry. The daughter’s depiction of Fuenzalida is t­ elling: El hombre del gimnasio se mueve como un animal. Posee la aserti­ vidad de un tigre, la elegancia de una cobra, la ferocidad de un dragón. Es extremadamente económico en sus movimientos, sabe lo que hace y no necesita actuar de más. El tipo del Fiat 125 color celeste se mueve bien. Es joven, pelea con agilidad, pero la ansiedad lo traiciona, la falta de control y de experiencia, el exceso de ímpetu. La diferencia entre los dos combatientes es notable. El hombre del gimnasio está tocado por la gracia. Luego de un par de patadas

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certeras, vence a su oponente con una llave magistral que lo inmoviliza y lo deja fuera de ­combate.68 The man from the gym moves like an animal. He has the confidence of a tiger, the elegance of a cobra, the ferocity of a dragon. He is extremely economical with his movements, he knows what he does and does not need to do more. The guy with the light blue Fiat 125 moves very well. He is young, he fights skilfully, but his anxiety lets him down, his lack of ­self-­control and experience, he’s too impetuous. The difference between them is remarkable. The man from the gym has a gift. After a couple of precise kicks, he defeats his opponent with a masterful move that paralyses and puts him out of the ­game.

The introduction of the first fight (of three) in the story, in a manner typical of the martial arts genre, suggests a version of the traumatic past as playing out a battle between good against evil. The narrative appropriation of images of the dictatorship is conveyed by the way that political repression surfaces in everyday life. The cause of the combat is Ricardo Ríos, a university student who lies in the street after being hit by a bus. He was attempting to escape his captors and torturers. The scene takes place in a residential street in Santiago’s city centre. Prior to the fight, the narrator describes the daily activities of surrounding people: a woman does some shopping in the local bakery store and some students wait for public transport. However, it is clear that the daughter does not appropriate these images from the past in order to reconstruct the trauma of political repression. She does not write a story of the first generation’s traumas from an empathetic point of view. Her treatment of the images of the dictatorship is too playful. For example, many characters in the story the daughter is drafting are based on real people and events during the dictatorship. Ricardo Ríos corresponds to Carlos Contreras Maluje, a young pharmacist and communist militant who jumped in front of a bus while escaping from army agents in 1976. His story is unique, since this event permitted his family to find his location and pressure the Supreme Court to dictate the only writ of amparo granted during the dictatorship. Lieutenant Roberto Fuentes Castro is based on Air Force Commander Roberto Fuentes Morrison, executed by members of the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez in 1989. Chief member of the ‘Comando Conjunto Subversivo’, an operative unit composed of members of the army, police and air

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force, Fuentes Morrison’s group was involved in Contreras Maluje’s episode, the incident that prompted the dissolution of the unit. The novel offers many other examples of such a practice, a strategy that serves to foreground the persistence of images associated with particular forms of remembering the traumatic past. Therefore, the daughter engages with traumatic images, but only to ­self-­consciously appropriate them for the entertainment industry, while criticising the memory narratives of the first generation and their conventions. After all, she describes her writing process as ‘un juego sencillo jugado en serio’69 (‘a simple game played seriously’). As a consequence, the legacy of memories and embodied experiences from the first generation is playfully rewritten to challenge trauma as the narrative core of the dictatorial p ­ ast. By discussing the interactions and tensions between generations regarding the traumatic past, this chapter has tried to highlight the significance of the figure of the daughter in the memory debate and the purpose behind the daughters’ reassessment of the past in both texts. The daughters’ practices allow Barros’s and Fernández’s texts to be read as critical postmemorial productions of an inherited past. ‘El lugar del otro’ is marked by an unresolved tension between generations. It confronts internalised memory narratives of the past (nostalgia and a heroic fight against oppression) but uses the figure of the daughter to reject them, since this figure remains anxious to find a position from which to deal properly with her sense of uprooting in the present. This tension is, to some extent, overcome in Fuenzalida by the daughter’s rewriting of individual and collective traumatic events. Even though the daughter also experiences the transfer of memories, she is able to deflate the burden of trauma by playfully rewriting the past, always ­self-­conscious of narration as a product of literary devices. In addition, the daughters’ approach to the traumatic past in the texts departs from the way in which other important daughters of the dictatorship engage with the trauma of the previous generation, such as Bachelet, Matthei, Allende, Díaz or Pizarro. Both texts, ultimately, show how there is always a danger when transferring memories from one generation to another whether through the imposition of painful memories or the silencing of traumas that shape the life of younger generations in contemporary post-­ dictatorial societies in Latin A ­ merica.

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The relationship between patriarchy, collective memory and its impact on the process of identity formation of women in the aftermath of violence began our discussion. It is against this ­socio-­cultural backdrop that the fictions in this study have been approached. Patriarchy, as a structure of subjugation, works by shaping social discourses of the traumatic past, in this case deploying conventional images of femininity in the public sphere as a means of restoring to women the more passive, f­ amily-­oriented role in society. These patriarchal discourses have variously produced vindicatory narratives of the 1973 coup and subsequent ‘military government’, heroic discourses of resistance and rebellion against dictatorial oppression, to C ­hristian-­ inspired commemorative gestures of national reconciliation since the return to democracy in the 1990s. The readings of the fictions of Carlos Franz, Diamela Eltit, Pía González, Fátima Sime, Arturo Fontaine, Pía Barros and Nona Fernández have focused on how they resist such social discourses of the past by portraying women in positions that could be categorised as ‘marginal’. Their recent fictions (2005–12) are linked to a crisis in dominant narratives of the past. They emerge from the historical revisionism of the coup, dictatorial rule and transitional years that followed the detention of Pinochet in London (1998) and his demise during the last government of the Concertación coalition (2006). These authors oppose m ­ ale-­controlled discourses of the past, while also disrupting patriarchal practices of ­ subject-­ formation and representation. Social discourses of the past are constantly revealed to be the products of male elites in positions of domination: the military regime, guerrilla and activist leaderships or conservative political coalitions. The authors use fictional writing to flag up and repudiate

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the conventional imagery of women that is found within the sphere of memory politics. In particular, they use intertextuality, ­self-­reflexivity, parody and satire to challenge masculinist representations of the p ­ ast. These literary engagements with collective memories of the past have also allowed us to discuss the different historical trajectories from which the discourses emerge. For example, it was pointed out that Eltit’s ­re-­articulations of ritual violence in Lumpérica are part of a critique of state terrorism, turning the text into an unconventional act of political protest. Eltit’s later critique in Jamás el Fuego Nunca highlights how structures that subjugated women operated in groups that paradoxically fought against military culture. Sime’s Carne de Perra suggests a subtle critique of complicit political attitudes during the ­re-­democratisation process led by the successful Concertación coalition. In other words, these authors mobilise topics and narrative strategies for purposes that, although not totally different, are also historically specific. However, several points can be also made regarding this group of fictions without attempting to even out their narrative particularities or critical ­agendas. The texts examined struggle with two problems. On the one hand, they attempt to bear witness to the horrific experiences of women under dictatorial rule. On the other hand, most of them also acknowledge the impossibility of achieving this goal through fictional writing. None of the novels fully advances a denunciatory agenda regarding the military regime and its brutal practices. Yet, many of the discussed texts are, to varying degrees, productive in grappling with the form and content of social discourses of that traumatic past. The texts’ critical agendas focus on ­male-­designed memory narratives of dictatorial rule across the political spectrum. They highlight that both left and right in ­post-­dictatorship Chile can be accused of ignoring or supressing the specificities of women’s experiences during the dictatorship and, moreover, how they remember such experiences. This range of critical perspectives can be gathered into three groups. In the first group, narratives produced by Pinochet’s regime are criticised for the reinforcement of a militaristic normativity. In these discourses, women’s identities were ‘naturally’ associated with the roles of mother and wives. These identities were useful for the regime’s ideological and political discourses. The restitution of ‘order’ and

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‘salvation’ of the country, the regime claimed to achieve, demanded that women return to their ‘natural’ roles as mothers and wives. These roles were ‘interrupted’ by Allende’s government and political project. Franz’s El Desierto is, in part, a narrative example of this agenda. The relationship between Laura and Cáceres is a clear ­re-­enactment of the restitution of patriarchal ‘order’ in Pampa Hundida. Similarly, Sime’s Carne de Perra also focuses on the diverse strategies for the restitution of ‘order’ deployed by the torturer Krank upon María Rosa. Their gendered roles are clear examples of this aim: Krank calls himself ‘the prince’, while María Rosa is his ‘doll’. Even Fernández’s postmemorial novel Fuenzalida takes a moment to foreground the conventions of the regime’s social discourse regarding women. This happens when the daughter recalls an image of her family living in a beautiful house soon to be adorned with religious iconography and near Chile’s most prominent centre of political detention and t­ orture. However ­male-­controlled narratives of the past and gendered identity discourses are not only criticised as the product of extreme ­r ight-­w ing ideology. A second group of novels highlights comparable strategies of subordination of women within the ­anti-­Pinochet movements and social activist groups associated with the Chilean left. Chapter 2 discussed the memory of two very different experiences of women within the opposition movements: urban guerrilla militancy and ­ Christian-­ inspired social activism. The ­anti-­dictatorial discourses addressed in Jamás el Fuego Nunca and Libreta de Familia seem paradoxically most oppressive when they function dogmatically. They demand from female militants a process of i­dentity-­reformulation following a model that is always masculine (Jamás el Fuego Nunca) or the reinforcement of patriarchal ideology in the case of social activism (Libreta de Familia). In these novels, different critical agendas are pursued. For instance, individual memory in Eltit’s novel contests the imposition of the ‘We’ and favours the recovery of the female militant’s ‘I’. The novel also disrupts the ‘sanctified’ narratives of the left by using a hallucinatory register and fragmentary mode of recollection. These strategies ultimately invite the reader to doubt the heroism associated with guerrilla struggle against the regime. Libreta de Familia instead chooses to satirise the ­anti-­Pinochet discourses of those individuals of bourgeois origin who are close to the Catholic Church. The purpose behind the use of satire is to expose the

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patriarchal ideology they perpetuate, and which still echoes in democratic Chile. Laura is confined to the private sphere as wife and then mother of her two daughters, while her husband (Nicolás) is the one who actively fulfils his activist aspirations in the public sphere. But Laura actually idealises political activism as a possible way to escape the constraints of an unhappy marriage and the burden of motherhood. After all, when the opportunity to act literally materialises in her backyard, she is unable to do so and expects her husband to handle the problem. One particularly significant consequence of this attitude, the novel suggests, is Laura’s perpetuation of a ­male-­controlled social order. Her frustrations as wife and mother initially disguise this phenomenon, yet the satire of her fantasised ‘activism’ helps to expose the underlying patriarchal codes that shape her ‘political work’ and naturalise her identity. The critique of the memory discourses of the Chilean left, evident in Barros’s ‘El lugar del otro’ analysed in Chapter 4, even extends to the generation of daughters of those directly affected by dictatorial violence. As in Libreta de Familia, the critique of the left’s nostalgic narration of the past is articulated through mockery and humour. Luciana responds playfully to inherited discourses of the Chilean exile community through images from popular culture films. She disrupts the sanctity and nostalgia attached to Chile’s social revolution and heroic resistance against oppression. What is more, Luciana’s main concern is to locate a space where it might be possible to voice her rootless condition as a child of exiles. These are perspectives and voices excluded from memory discourses in the ­anti-­Pinochet movements. The texts suggest, therefore, that ­left-­w ing ideology can be equally criticised for its application of oppressive practices upon female members shaped by masculinist collective discourses of the ­past. The third group of texts repudiates the ­top-­down perspective of the Concertación coalition and its politics of memory in the aftermath of violence engineered by male political elites. For the idea of the reconciled Chilean family disseminated by the transitional governments, women’s maternal and nurturing qualities became the fulcrum of a national process of reconciliation. Such processes are particularly evident in Sime’s Carne de Perra and Fontaine’s La Vida Doble. These novels link the figure of the female collaborator to the consensual approach to the past set out by the Concertación coalition. This association is not accidental. As both victim and

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perpetrator, the collaborator embodies the horror of the past that the new authorities considered too contentious for the public. As the life stories of real female collaborators have demonstrated (Marcia Merino and Luz Arce), one possible strategy for dealing with the past is to embrace the discourse of the reconciled national family. This implies encouraging women to return to essentialist views on their maternal role at the centre of the family, conveniently sanctioned by the Catholic Church (another key actor in the process of redemocratisation). Yet in these novels, critical strategies for testifying the past emerge from María Rosa’s and Irene/ Lorena’s experiences of violence and betrayal. Both novels initially shape María Rosa’s and Irene/Lorena’s stories as C ­ hrist-­ like processes of humiliation, sacrifice and atonement akin to the reconciliation project of the transitional governments, only to later challenge those procedures. Carne de Perra uses satire to show how social discourses of the reconciled family and the women that facilitate such appeasement are ultimately patriarchal fantasies. La Vida Doble uses Laura’s heterogeneous intertexts to turn the homogeneity of the remorseful confessions and gendered discourses into redundant constructions. Ultimately, these texts remind us that women were ‘invited’ to participate in the process of redemocratisation in the country via the performance of conventional gender ­roles. Finally, the fundamental research questions laid out in the introduction to this study focused on three problems: the perpetuation of gendered images in collective memories of traumatic experiences; the critical potential of fiction in the rewriting of narratives of the past and national history; and women’s participation in the production of collective memories after conflict. This book has shown how, as a collective body of work, the texts analysed here offer means for repudiating totalising explanations of the traumatic past that maintain gender hierarchies. But a question remains regarding this line of criticism. The majority of the novels examined struggle to go further than the simple dismantling of existing and gendered collective discourses of diverse groups and coalitions. In short, they struggle to image alternative, more inclusive forms of social remembering for the nation. In El Desierto, we discover at the end of the novel that the narration of the past is, once again, under the control of a masculine figure (Mario). The nameless and reclusive guerrilla fighter in Jamás el Fuego Nunca just

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gets out of bed at the end of the novel, after a long night of insomnia and hallucinations, to carry on with her deteriorating existence. Laura in Libreta de Familia never really addresses her traumatic past outside the frame of her role as devoted mother and member of a typical Catholic m ­ iddle-­ class family. Moreover, María Rosa in Carne de Perra helps her torturer Krank to die unpunished and carries on working as a nurse, while Irene/Lorena in La Vida Doble just awaits death as a terminal cancer patient after selling her testimony to an unknown writer. Only Fernández’s text, Fuenzalida, seems to offer an alternative form of remembering the traumatic past. After all, she rewrites the story of her father’s disappearance as a show for television or as a ­martial-­arts film set in the harshest years of dictatorial oppression. In doing so, a daughter who grew up under dictatorial rule finds a way of becoming an active agent in the rewriting of the traumatic past and not only its passive recipient. The range of engagements that arise from these novels, nevertheless, shows us that collective memories are articulated in the present for strategic reasons that implicate the whole political spectrum. These discourses remain tightly linked to an enduring social structure of subordination. The work of these authors is partially successful in imagining a more critical relationship between individual and collective memories. This approach is useful in hindering the perpetuation of gendered narratives of the past. Certainly, the means for challenging gendered social structures and memory discourses can be found in these recent examples of Chilean narratives of the dictatorship. Yet, it is also necessary to keep looking to literature for alternative forms of social remembering that not only critique, but which also refashion the dominant ways of understanding the military dictatorship, its collective memory and the experiences and voices of ­women.

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Notes

Introduction   1 The gender imbalance of the commission was evident and characteristic of the new democratic, yet conservative government. The committee included seven male lawyers, but only two women: lawyer Laura Novoa and social worker Mónica Jiménez.   2 Katherine Hite, ‘The Politics of Memory in Chile’, in Cath Collins and others (eds), The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO and London: First Forum Press, 2013), pp. 1–29.  3 Alexander Wilde, ‘Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 31 (1999), 475–500.   4 Alexander Wilde, ‘A Season of Memory: Human Rights in Chile’s Long Transition’, in Cath Collins and others (eds), The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO and London: First Forum Press, 2013), pp. 31–60.   5 Hite, ‘The Politics of Memory in Chile’, p. ­20.   6 Steve Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. ­x x.   7 Sylvia Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990).  8 Walby, Theorizing Patriarchy, p. ­20.  9 Julieta Kirkwood, Ser Política en Chile (Santiago: FLACSO, 1986); Feminarios (Santiago: Ediciones Documentas, 1987). 10 Lisa Baldez, Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 1–46. 11 María Elena Valenzuela, La Mujer en el Chile Militar (Santiago: Ediciones Chile and ­A mérica-­CESOC, 1987), pp. 63–92. 12 Annie G. Dandavati, Engendering Democracy in Chile (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 99–134. 13 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p.  23. It is revealing in Halbwachs’s quotation that he

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refers to ‘men’ (‘hommes’ in the original) and not ‘people’ when talking about the collective and public dimension of memory, confirming a persistent male approach to these issues and the marginalisation of women in these discussions. The original quotation in French reads as follows: ‘Il n’est pas nécessaire que d’autres hommes soient là, qui se distinguent matériellement de nous: car nous portons toujours avec nous et en nous une quantité de personnes qui ne se confondent pas’. In Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire Collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), p. ­2. 14 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. ­43. 15 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, pp. 54–166. 16 Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, p. ­48. 17 Steve Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. ­5. 18 Stern, Remembering, pp. 7–34. 19 Stern, Remembering, p. ­27. 20 Unless otherwise stated, all translations from the Spanish are mine. See Pedro Vidal, El Movimiento Contra la Tortura ‘Sebastián Acevedo’: Derechos Humanos y la Producción de Símbolos Nacionales bajo el Fascismo Chileno (Santiago: Editorial Mosquito Comunicación, 2002). 21 See Hernán Vidal, Dar la Vida por la Vida: La Agrupación Chilena de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literatures, 1982). 22 Stern, Remembering, p. ­109. 23 The ­Pro-­Peace Committee began in 1973 as a network of religious leaders, lawyers, social workers and activists. Its aim was to awake the Chilean public to the moral disaster in the country as a consequence of human rights violations. It also provided legal assistance and moral support to relatives and friends of arrested dissidents. See Steve Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile 1973–1988 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 101–5. 24 The Vicariate of Solidarity began in 1976 under the Archdiocese of Santiago, following the regime’s pressure to dissolve the ­Pro-­Peace Committee. See Juan Ignacio Gutiérrez, La Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Madrid: Alianza, 1986). 25 Alfredo ­Jocelyn-­Holt, Espejo Retrovisor (Santiago: Planeta/Ariel, 2000), p. ­22. 26 Elizabeth Jelin, Los Trabajos de la Memoria (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 2002), p. ­111. 27 Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. ­84.

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28 María Di Liscia, ‘Género y Memorias’, Aljaba, 11 (2007), 141–66 (162). 29 Cath Collins and others (eds), The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO and London: First Forum Press, 2013). 30 Alfredo Joignant, ‘Pinochet’s Funeral: Memory, History, and Immortality’, in Cath Collins and others (eds), The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO and London: First Forum Press, 2013), pp. 165–96. 31 Mónica Madariaga, La Verdad y la Honestidad se Pagan Caro (Santiago: Edebé, 2002); Gladys Marín, La Vida es Hoy (Santiago: Edebé, 2002) and Clara Szczaranski, El Bisel del Espejo: Mi Ventana (Santiago: Edebé, 2002). 32 Nelly Richard, Crítica de la Memoria (Santiago: UDP, 2010), p. ­81. 33 Richard, Crítica, p. ­88. 34 Stern, Remembering, pp. 88–101. 35 Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues. Chile in Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. ­15. 36 The role of Christian Democrats is crucial in this regard. President Aylwin and Frei ­Ruiz-­Tagle led the country during the first decade of restored democracy in Chile. They implemented an effective politics of agreements and pacts with Pinochet, who remained as Capitán General of the Chilean Army until 1998. President Frei ­Ruiz-­Tagle’s administration also was instrumental in bringing back Pinochet to Chile after his arrest in London in 1998, charged for crimes against ­humanity. 37 Rodrigo Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán: Literatura Chilena y Experiencia Autoritaria (Santiago: Flacso, 1986). 38 Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán, p. ­14. 39 Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán, p. ­9. 40 Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán, ­p.134. 41 Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán, p. ­18. 42 Cánovas, Lihn, Zurita, Ictus, Radrigán, p. ­132. 43 Eugenia Brito, Campos Minados: Literatura ­Post-­Golpe en Chile (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1994), pp. 11–23. 44 Mario Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza: Novelas Chilenas de la Dictadura 1977–2010 (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2013), pp. 11–14. 45 Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza, pp. 22–3. 46 Rodrigo Cánovas, Novela Chilena, Nuevas Generaciones: El Abordaje de los Huérfanos (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 1997). 47 Stern, Remembering, pp. 39–103. 48 Cecilia Sosa, Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood (Woodbridge and Rochester: Tamesis, 2014), pp. 1–12.

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Chapter ­1  1 As in the Rettig committee, the gender imbalance of the Valech committee was telling. It was integrated by six male lawyers and only two women: social worker María Luisa Sepúlveda and psychologist Elizabeth ­Lira.  2 The Convención Interamericana para Prevenir, Sancionar y Erradicar la Violencia contra la Mujer (Belém do Pará, Brasil, 1994) and the Security Council adopted a resolution on women and peace and security, 31 October ­2000.   3 References to women’s participation in torture sessions are mentioned in Marcia Merino’s Mi Verdad (1993), Luz Arce’s El Infierno (1993) and Carmen Rojas’s Recuerdos de una Mirista (1988).  4 Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura, Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura (Santiago: La Comisión, 2005), pp. 575–80.   5 The most recent study on the subject is Nancy Guzmán Jasmen, Ingrid Olderock: La Mujer de los Perros (Santiago: CEIBO, 2014). By interviewing Ingrid Olderock and many of her victims, the book reconstructs the story of La Venda Sexy, one of the least known centres of political torture during the dictatorship. Olderock was the officer in charge of training dogs later used to sexually abuse male and female prisoners in this and other detention centres. Many survivors of La Venda Sexy testified for the Valech C ­ ommission.  6 María Elena Valenzuela, La Mujer en el Chile Militar (Santiago: Ediciones Chile and ­A mérica-­CESOC, 1987); Nelly Richard, Residuos y Metáforas: Ensayos de Crítica Cultural sobre el Chile de la Transición (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998), pp.  51–76; Raquel Olea, ‘La Redemocratización: Mujer, Feminismo y Política’, in Nelly Richard (ed.), Debates Críticos en América Latina (Santiago: ARCIS, 2008), pp. 145–50.   7 José Rodríguez Elizondo, ‘Una Novela Excepcional: El Desierto, de Carlos Franz’, Cono Sur: http://www.tendencias21.es/conosur­/Una- ­novela-­ excepcional-­El-­desierto-­de-­Carlos-­Franz_a96.html (accessed 28 January 2019) (para. 5 of 10).  8 Arturo Fontaine, ‘Franz’, www.letras.s5.com: http://www.letras.mysite. com/cf170705.htm (accessed 28 January 2019) (para. 2 of 7).   9 Tomás Eloy Martínez, ‘Un Autor con Instinto Literario y Voz Propia’, www.letras.s5.com: http://www.letras.mysite.com/cf090505.htm (accessed 28 January 2019) (para. 6 of 7). 10 Nelly Richard, Margins and Institutions: Art in Chile since 1973 (Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986), p. ­12.

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11 See Eva Klein ‘La (Auto)representación en Ruinas: Lumpérica, de Diamela Eltit’, Revista Casa de las Américas, 230 (2003), 130–5; Robert Neustadt, (Con)Fusing Signs and Postmodern Positions: Spanish American Performance, Experimental Writing, and the Critique of Political Confusion (New York: Garland, 1999); Raymond Leslie Williams, The Novel in the Americas (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1992); Kate Jenckes, ‘The Work of Literature and the Unworking of Community or Writing in Eltit’s Lumpérica’, The New Centennial Review, 3/1 (2003), 67–80; Raquel Olea, Lengua Víbora: Producciones de los Femenino en la Escritura de Mujeres Chilenas (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998); Alice Nelson, Political Bodies: Gender, History, and the Struggle for Narrative Power in Recent Chilean Literature (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002). 12 Diamela Eltit, ‘Errante, Errática’, in Juan Carlos Lértora (ed.), Una Poética de la Literatura Menor: La Literatura de Diamela Eltit (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1993), pp. 17–25 (p. 19). See also, ‘Errant, Erratic’, in E. Luminata, trans. by Ronald Christ (Santa Fe: Lumen, 1997), pp. 4–12 (p. 5). 13 Mary Green, Diamela Eltit: Reading the Mother (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Tamesis, 2007), p. ­114. 14 Nelly Richard, ‘Tres Funciones de Escritura: Desconstrucción, Simulación, Hibridación’, in Juan Carlos Lértora (ed.), Una Poética de Literatura Menor: La Narrativa de Diamela Eltit (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1993), pp. 37–51 (p. 38). 15 Valenzuela, La Mujer en el Chile Militar, pp. 63–92. 16 Eugenia Brito points out how Derrida, Lacan, Nietzsche, among other thinkers constituted the core readings of Ronald Kay’s and Patricio Marchant’s seminars at the DHS. Eltit studied under the guidance of Kay and Marchant. See Eugenia Brito, Campos Minados: Literatura ­ Post-­ Golpe en Chile (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1994), pp. 115–16. 17 Idelber Avelar, Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 166–9. 18 Julio Ortega, ‘Diamela Eltit y el Imaginario de la Virtualidad’, in Juan Carlos Lértora (ed.), Una Poética de Literatura Menor: La Narrativa de Diamela Eltit (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1993), pp. 53–81 (pp. 53–8). 19 Diamela Eltit has alluded to the name of this character in an interview with Leonidas Morales. She is not clear about the origin of this name, stating that a reiteration of the word Lumi is possible (as in ‘Lumi Luminada’). As Morales clarifies L. Iluminada (‘E. Luminata’ in the English translation of Ronald Christ) recalls the name of Lumi Videla, a MIR militant (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) detained in 1974, tortured and killed by Pinochet’s DINA (Dirección

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de Inteligencia Nacional). Her corpse was found in the gardens of the Italian Embassy in Santiago on 4 November 1974. The press ‘informed’ that she was the victim of Chilean exiles in the Embassy. See Leonidas Morales, Conversaciones con Diamela Eltit (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998), p. ­55. 20 Diamela Eltit, Lumpérica (Santiago: Las Ediciones del Ornitorrinco, 1983), p. ­74. 21 Diamela Eltit, E. Luminata, trans. by Ronald Christ (Santa Fe: Lumen, 1997), p. ­83. 22 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 3–5. 23 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­15. 24 Eltit, E. Luminata, pp. 24–5. 25 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. 11, p. 20 and p. ­33. 26 Eltit, E. Luminata, p. 19, p. 30 and p. ­47. 27 Ximena Bunster, ‘Surviving Beyond Fear: Women and Torture in Latin America’, in Marjorie Agosin (ed.), Surviving Beyond Fear: Women, Children and Human Rights in Latin America (New York: White Pine Press, 1993), pp. 98–125 (p. 104). 28 Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. ­181. 29 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­8. 30 Eltit, E. Luminata, p. ­15. 31 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­20. 32 Eltit, E. Luminata, p. ­30. 33 Idelber Avelar, The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. ­169. 34 Scarry, p. ­18. 35 Scarry, p. ­54. 36 In Maipú, Eltit washed the sidewalk in front of a brothel, inflicted a series of wounds on herself, and read parts of Lumpérica to a group of prostitutes. A detailed account of this performance can be found in Leonidas Morales (ed.), Conversaciones con Diamela Eltit (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1998), pp. 165–7. 37 Djelal Kadir, The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin American’s Writing Culture (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. ­184. 38 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­142. 39 Eltit, E. Luminata, p. ­150. 40 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­143. 41 Eltit, E. Luminata, p. ­151. 42 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­144.

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43 Eltit, E. Luminata, ­p.152. 44 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­148. 45 Eltit, E. Luminata, p. ­156. 46 Diamela Eltit, Emergencias: Escritos sobre Literatura, Arte y Política (Santiago: Planeta/Ariel, 2000), p. ­171. 47 Carlos Franz, El Desierto (Buenos Aires: La Nación/Sudamericana, 2005), p. 244. Italics in o ­ riginal. 48 Carlos Franz, The Absent Sea: A Novel, trans. by Leland H. Chambers, (Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co., 2011), pp. 193–4. Italics in o ­ riginal. 49 Michael A. Malpass, Daily Life in the Inca Empire (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009), p. ­97. 50 Franz, El Desierto, p. 221. Italics in o ­ riginal. 51 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 175. Italics in o ­ riginal. 52 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press), p. ­4. 53 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­217. Italics in original. 54 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 172. Italics in ­original. 55 Franz, El Desierto, pp. 374–5. Italics in o ­ riginal. 56 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 300. Italics in ­original. 57 Franz, El Desierto, p. 53, p. 149, p. 241 and p. ­377. Italics in original. 58 Franz, The Absent sea, p. 41, p. 117, p. 191 and p. ­302. Italics in original. 59 Patricio Aylwin, La Transición Chilena: Discursos Escogidos, Marzo 1900 – 1992 (Santiago: Andrés Bello, 1992), p. ­394. 60 Jorge Mera, ‘Chile: Truth and Justice under the Democratic Government’, in Naomi R ­ oht-­ A rriaza (ed.), Impunity and Human Rights in International Law and Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 171–84 (pp. 183–4). 61 These are the speeches: (i) ‘Ceremonia de conmemoración de los 42 años de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos y el 12° aniversario de la Comisión Chilena de Derechos Humanos’, 10 diciembre 1990; (ii) ‘Mensaje de fin de año a los chilenos’, 31 de diciembre 1990; and (iii) ‘Al recibir el informe de la Comisión de Verdad y Reconciliación’, 8 de febrero 1991. In Patricio Aylwin, La Transición Chilena: Discursos Escogidos, Marzo 1900 –1992 (Santiago: Andrés Bello, 1992), p. 121, p. 123 and p. ­414. 62 Franz, El Desierto, p. 230, p. 281 and p. ­309. 63 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­381. Italics in original. 64 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 305. Italics in ­original. 65 Diamela Eltit, Los Vigilantes (Santiago: Sudamericana, 1994), p. ­46. 66 Diamela Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, trans. by Helen Lane and Ronald Christ (Lumen: Santa Fe, 2005), pp. 36–7. 67 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­77. 68 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­61. 69 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­54.

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 70 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­42.  71 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­73.  72 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­57.   73 Like in Lumpérica, the vagrants of the city embody the marginalised of Chilean society and the residues of Chile’s traumatic past, hence Margarita’s interest in helping them within the constraints of a market driven ­society.  74 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­32.  75 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­25.  76 Eltit, Lumpérica, p. ­63.  77 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­49.  78 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­64.  79 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, pp. 49–50.  80 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­112.  81 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­88.  82 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­61.  83 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­47.  84 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­55.  85 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­43.  86 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­45.  87 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­36.  88 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­75.  89 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­59.  90 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­91.  91 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­72.  92 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­126.  93 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­101.  94 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­125.  95 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­127.  96 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­102.  97 Eltit, Vigilantes, p. ­128.  98 Eltit, Custody of the Eyes, p. ­102.   99 An example of this second image is provided by Carmen Rojas in her testimonial account of political prison Recuerdos de una Mirista (1988). Here, memory appears as a stable faculty, useful in reconstructing a fixed image of the past. This is noticeable in Rojas’s testimony from its opening pages. The aim of her narrative is clear: ‘para rescatar estos recuerdos y a los hombres de carne y hueso, con reacciones humanas en situaciones límites en que les tocó hacer la historia, es que se ha escrito este libro’ (p. 7) (‘this book has been written to recover the memories of men of flesh and bones with human reactions that made history in the extreme situations they lived through’). 100 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. ­51.

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101 Nietzsche, The Birth, p. ­17. 102 Nietzsche, The Birth, p. ­60. 103 Steve Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. ­109. 104 Franz, El Desierto, p. 373. Italics in o ­ riginal. 105 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 299. Italics in ­original. 106 Franz, El Desierto, p. 26. Italics in o ­ riginal. 107 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 213. Italics in original. Parenthesis in translation ­only. 108 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus ­Logico- ­Philosophicus (Routledge: London and New York, 2002), p. ­89. 109 William Child, Wittgenstein (Routledge: London and New York, 2011), pp. 23–73. 110 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, p. ­3. 111 Franz, El Desierto, p. 377. Italics in original. 112 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 302. Italics in o ­ riginal. 113 Scarry, p. ­35. 114 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­11. 115 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. ­7. 116 Franz, El Desierto, p. 28. Italics in original. 117 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. ­21. Italics in original. 118 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­55. Italics in original. 119 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 43. Italics in o ­ riginal. 120 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­55. Italics in original. 121 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 43. Italics in o ­ riginal. 122 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­268. Italics in original. 123 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 44. Italics in ­original. 124 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­237. Italics in original. 125 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 188. Italics in o ­ riginal. 126 Franz, El Desierto, pp. 375–6. Italics in ­original. 127 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 301. Italics in ­original. 128 Due to their status as remorseful confessions of female collaboration, Arce’s and Merino’s texts will be discussed in Chapter 3 of this study in relation to Fátima Sime’s novel Carne de Perra (2009) and Arturo Fontaine’s novel La Vida Doble (2010). 129 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. 42. Italics in o ­ riginal. 130 Ingrid Castro, ‘El Monstruo de la Memoria’, www.letras.s.5.com: http:// www.letras.mysite.com/cf220305.htm (accessed 28 January 2019) (para. 9 of 10). 131 Miguel Mora, ‘Carlos Franz sitúa en el desierto de Chile una relación ­v íctima-­verdugo’, www.elpais.com: http://elpais.com/diario/2005/06/19/ cultura/1119132005_850215.html (accessed 28 January 2019) (para. 7 of 11).

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132 Michael Foucault, ‘Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Vol. 1 Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 163–73 (p. 165). 133 Franz, El Desierto, p. ­460. 134 Franz, The Absent Sea, p. ­368.

Chapter ­2  1 Mario Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza: Novelas Chilenas de la Dictadura 1977–2010 (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2013).  2 Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza, p. ­11.  3 Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza, pp. 11–45.   4 This issue was, for example, one of the main topics of discussion in a symposium held between 24 and 29 February 1999 at the Catholic University of E ­ ichstätt-­Ingolstadt. Its proceedings can be found in Karl Kohut and José Morales Saravia (eds), Literatura Chilena Hoy: La Difícil Transición (Frankfurt/Main and Madrid: Vervuert Verlag and Iberoamericana, 2002).  5 Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza, pp. 18–19.   6 Verónica Cortínez, ‘Entrevista Colectiva’, in Verónica Cortínez (ed.), Albricia: La Novela Chilena de Fin de Siglo (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000), pp. 231–62 (p. 239).   7 Fernando Moreno, ‘Apuntes en torno a la Tematización de la Historia en la Narrativa Chilena Actual’, in Karl Kohut and José Morales Saravia (eds), Literatura Chilena Hoy: La Difícil Transición (Frankfurt/ Main and Madrid: Vervuert Verlag and Iberoamericana, 2002), pp. 271–8 (p. 273).   8 The Frente Popular was an electoral and political ­left-­w ing coalition from 1937 to 1941. It was mainly integrated by the Radical Party, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Democratic Party and the Radical Socialist Party, along with social organisations such as trade unions, Mapuche movements and feminist ­a ssociations.  9 Symbolic institutions of this period and political project are the Instituto Nacional (1833) and the Universidad de Chile (1842). 10 Cristián Opazo, ‘Anatomía de los Hombres Grises: Rescrituras de la Novela Social en el Chile de Postdictadura’, Acta Literaria, 38 (2009), 91–109 (109). 11 Jaime Collyer, ‘Escribir en Chile Hoy: La Nueva Censura’, in Karl Kohut and José Morales Saravia (eds), Literatura Chilena Hoy: La Difícil Transición (Frankfurt/Main and Madrid: Vervuert Verlag and Iberoamericana, 2002), pp. 177–86 (p. 183). My emphasis ­added.

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12 Cedomil Goic, Historia de la Novela Hispanoamericana (Valparaíso: Universitarias, 1972), p. ­217. 13 Alejandro Lavquen, ‘Díaz Eterovic en la pista de la fama’, www.puntofinal.cl: http://www.puntofinal.cl/647/eterovic.htm (accessed 16 February 2015) (para. 6 of 16). 14 Opazo, ‘Anatomía’, p. ­93. 15 Eugenia Brito (ed.), Campos Minados: Literatura P ­ ost-­Golpe en Chile (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1994). 16 Verónica Cortínez (ed.), Albricia: La Novela Chilena de Fin de Siglo (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000). 17 Diamela Eltit, Jamás el Fuego Nunca (Santiago: Seix Barral, 2007), p. ­32. 18 Two of the most important operations carried out by the FPMR were the attempted assassination of General Pinochet in September 1986 (known as ‘Operación Siglo XX’) and the assassination of former Pinochet adviser and later senator Jaime Guzmán in April ­1991. 19 Gladys Marín, La Vida es Hoy (Santiago: Edebé, 2002), p. 11. Quoted in Nelly Richard, ­‘No-­Revelaciones, Confesiones y Transacciones de Género’, in Crítica de la Memoria (1990–2010) (Santiago: Ediciones UDP, 2010), p. ­86. 20 Nelly Richard and Diamela Eltit, ‘Gladys Marín: Un Retrato’, in Nelly Richard (ed.), Debates Críticos en América Latina I (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008), pp. 129–39 (p. 135). 21 Richard, ­‘No-­Revelaciones’, pp. 86–7. Indeed, Cherie Zalaquett has also demonstrated the effectiveness of these practices after analysing the testimony of the only woman involved in the unsuccessful Pinochet assassination attempt in 1986, identified as ‘Fabiola’. Discourses of committed militancy of the FPMR, shaped around the reformulation of identity, were produced in order to fulfil the ideals of sacrifice of the revolutionary. Through her memories, ‘Fabiola’ is keen to recover such doctrine, without considering its implications in terms of her subjectivity. Remembering the moment she was offered a place in the elite group of FPMR militants chosen to carry out the secret mission, ‘Fabiola’ states: ‘El amor a la familia y el apego a la vida son muy fuertes, pero al igual que mis compañeros tuve que superarlo’ (‘the love to my family and attachment to life are powerful, but like my comrades I had to overcome those feelings’). Quoted in Cherie Zalaquett, ‘La Frentista “Fabiola”: Un Relato en Reversa del Atentado a Pinochet’, Revista Izquierdas, 9 (2011), 1–30 (15). 22 Michael J. Lazzara, María Rosa ­ Olivera-­ Williams and Mónica Szurmuk, ‘Violencia, Memoria, Justicia: Una Entrevista a Pilar Calveiro’, A Contracorriente, 10/2 (2013), 324–46 (343). 23 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­21.

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24 Michel Foucault, ‘Two lectures’, in C. Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), p. ­98. 25 Michael Foucault, Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 135–55. 26 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­21. 27 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­110. 28 María Inés Lagos, ‘Subjetividades Corporalizadas: “Maldito Amor” de Rosario Ferré y Jamás el Fuego Nunca de Diamela Eltit’, Nomadías, 10 (2009), 87–110 (101). 29 Eltit, Jamás, pp. 101–2. 30 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­107. 31 Gottfried Korff, ‘From Brotherly Handshake to Militant Clenched Fist: On Political Metaphors for the Worker’s Hand’, International Labor and W ­ orking-­Class History, 42 (1992), 70–81. 32 Geneviève Calbris, Elements of Meaning in Gesture (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2011), p. ­28. 33 Joan Oleza, La Novela del XIX: Del Parto a la Crisis de una Ideología (Valencia: Bello, 1976), p. ­7. 34 Pía González, Libreta de Familia (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2008), p. ­83. 35 González, Libreta, p. ­56. 36 González, Libreta, p. ­247. 37 Quoted in Cedomil Goic, ‘Martín Rivas’, www.cervantesvirtual.com: http://www.cervantesvirtual.com­/obra- ­visor/martin- ­r ivas/html/faa97cb4c04a-11e1-b1fb-00163ebf5e63_6.html#I_4_ (accessed 19 August 2014). 38 González, Libreta, p. 41, p. 117 and p. ­177. 39 Patricia Espinosa, ‘Revolución y Machismo’, Las Últimas Noticias, 2 January 2009, p. ­34. 40 González, Libreta, p. ­21. 41 González, Libreta, p. ­153. 42 González, Libreta, p. ­154. 43 González, Libreta, p. ­38. 44 González, Libreta, p. ­58. 45 González, Libreta, p. ­201 46 González, Libreta, pp. 201–2. 47 González, Libreta, p. ­208. 48 González, Libreta, p. ­210. 49 Hernán Vidal, Dar la Vida por la Vida: Agrupación Chilena de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Santiago: Mosquito Editores, 1996), pp.  11–26; Paola Díaz and Carolina Gutiérrez, ‘Resistencias en Dictadura y en ­Post-­Dictadura: La Acción Colectiva de la Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Chile’, Pandora: Revue D’etudes Hispaniques, 8 (2008), 187–204; Margaret Burchianti, ‘Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and

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the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories’, History and Anthropology, 15/2 (2005), 133–50; Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 193–207. 50 Taylor, Disappearing Acts, p. 194. Emphasis in ­original. 51 Vidal, Dar la Vida por la Vida, p. ­209. 52 Díaz and Gutiérrez, ‘Resistencias’, p. ­201. 53 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­14. 54 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­84. 55 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­43. 56 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­83. 57 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­108. 58 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­125. 59 Tamara Vidaurrázaga, ‘Mujeres en Rojo y en Negro: Reconstrucción de Memoria de Tres Mujeres Miristas (1971–1990)’ (unpublished master’s dissertation, Universidad de Chile, 2005), 159–66. See also, Tamara Vidaurrázaga, Mujeres en Rojo y en Negro (Santiago: Ediciones Escaparate, 2006). 60 Eltit, Jamás, p. ­66. 61 Martín Hopenhayn, ‘Moral y Secularización en el Chile Finisecular: Especulaciones para el Debate’, in Cecilia Montero and others (eds), ¿Hacia dónde va la Sociedad Chile? (Santiago: Colección Estudios CIEPLAN, 1993), pp. 136–45 (pp. 139–40). 62 Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition, trans. by Alan West-­ ­ Durán and Theodore Quester (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. ­132. 63 Vidaurrázaga, ‘Mujeres en Rojo’, pp. 67–8. 64 Julieta Kirkwood, Ser Política en Chile (Santiago: Flacso, 1986), p. 180. Julieta Kirkwood was a sociologist, political scientist and theorist in Chile. Kirkwood is considered a key figure of the feminist movement in Chile during the 1980s. She was also instrumental in the introduction of gender studies in ­Chile. 65 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), p. ­499. 66 Beauvoir, Second, pp. 499–504. 67 González, Libreta, p. ­11. 68 González, Libreta, p. ­105. 69 González, Libreta, p. ­21. 70 Beauvoir, Second, p. ­328. 71 Olga Grau, ‘Familia: Un Grito de Fin de Siglo’, in Eugenia Brito and others (eds), Discurso, Género y Poder: Discursos Públicos: Chile 1978–1993 (Santiago: ARCIS/LOM/La Morada, 1997), pp. 127–47 (p. 134). 72 González, Libreta, pp. 122–3. My e­ mphasis.

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Chapter ­3   1 Fátima Sime, Carne de Perra (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2009).   2 Arturo Fontaine, La Vida Doble (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2010).   3 Álvaro Bisama, ‘Libros: Literatura de horror criolla’, www.quepasa.cl: http://quepasa.cl/articulo/20_3718_9.html (accessed 15 November 2012); Patricia Espinosa, ‘Carne de perra’, Nomadías, 10 (2011), 269–70; Camila Camacho, ‘La Práctica de la Tortura como ­Des-­integración del Sujeto en Carne de perra de Fátima Sime’ (unpublished master’s dissertation, Universidad de Chile, 2010).   4 Cristián Montes, ‘“Carne de Perra,” de Fátima Sime: La Persistencia de lo Urgente’, Iberoamericana, 44 (2011), 63–78 (77).  5 Daniuska González, ‘“Un Estropajo. Un Instrumento Desechable. Eso fui”. EL CUERPO ABYECTO: Carne de Perra de Fátima Sime’, Revista Nueva del Pacífico, 58 (2013), 27–44 (41).  6 Nicolás Salerno, ‘Quiebres y Continuidades de la Sociabilidad Chilena: El Realismo en Oír su Voz de Arturo Fontaine Talavera’, in Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 31/61 (2005), 151–63; María Luisa Fischer, ‘Oír su Voz de Arturo Fontaine Talavera: La Escritura de la Superficie’, in Verónica Cortínez (ed.), Albricia: La Novela Chilena de Fin de Siglo (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000), pp. 147–60.   7 Carlos Franz, ‘La Vida Doble de Arturo Fontaine’, www.letraslibres. com: http://www.letraslibres.com/revista/letrillas­/la- ­vida-­doble- ­de-­arturo-­ fontaine (accessed 15 November 2012) (para. 5 of 10).   8 Ricardo Leiva, ‘La Traición según Fontaine’, www.quepasa.cl: http:// www.quepasa.cl/articulo/19_3662_9_2.html (accessed 27 March 2013) (para. 3 of 17).  9 Catalina Olea, ‘Mujeres y Colaboración en Tres Novelas de la Dictadura Chilena’ (unpublished master’s dissertation, University de Chile, 2014), 9–30. 10 Mario Lillo, Silencio, Trauma y Esperanza: Novelas Chilenas de la Dictadura 1977–2010 (Santiago: Ediciones UC, 2013), p. ­13. 11 Lillo’s understanding of this type of novel in Latin America is informed by Cedomil Goic. For Goic, the novela superrealista, like all contemporary novels, distorts the narrative form that peaked with the modern novel: a narrative voice portrayed an ordinary world and everyday experiences. For Goic, the new novel removed or lessened the presence of a basic narrator or ended up displacing it by means of multiple narrators. The point of view, in each instance, stopped being rational and causal. In addition, irrational dimensions shaped consciousness, narrative modes became mainly expositive, the structure turned into fragmentary and juxtaposition replaced the logical ordering of motives in the traditional dispositio. See Cedomil Goic,

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Los Mitos Degradados: Ensayos de Comprensión de la Literatura Hispanoamericana (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), p. ­231. 12 Jaume Peris, ‘Memoria de la Represión y Dispositivo Metaficcional: El Impasse Ético de La Vida Doble de Arturo Fontaine’, in Antonio Gil (ed.), Las Sombras del Novelista (Binges: Editions Orbis Tertius, 2013), p.  270. See also Jaume Peris, ‘Contradicciones de la Memoria: Ficcionalización del Testimonio y Figuración de la Traición en La Vida Doble (Arturo Fontaine, 2010)’, Les Ateliers du SAL, 3 (2013), 49–63. 13 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of S­ elf-­Conscious Fiction (London and New York, Routledge, 1984), p. ­2. 14 Founded in 1988, the Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia was a ­centre-­left political coalition. It included the Partido Demócrata Cristiano, Partido Socialista, Partido por la Democracia, Partido Unión Socialista Popular, Partido Radical, Partido Radical Sindicalista Democrático, Partido Social Democracia, Partido Democrático Nacional, Partido Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitaria, Partido MAPU Obrero Campesino, Partido Izquierda Cristiana, Partido Humanista, Partido Unión ­Liberal-­Republicana and Partido Los Verdes. After the national referendum of 5 October 1988 that put an end to General Pinochet’s military regime, the Concertación coalition won four consecutive presidential elections between 1989 and 2010. These governments were led by Christian Democrats President Patricio Aylwin (1990–4) and President Arturo Frei (1994–2000), and Socialists President Ricardo Lagos (2000–6) and President Michelle Bachelet (2006–10). 15 Ronit Lentin, ‘Femina Sacra: Gendered Memory and Political Violence’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 29 (2006), 463–73 (465). 16 Michael J. Lazzara, Chile in Transition: The Poetics and Politics of Memory (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006), pp. 64–100. 17 Agrupación de Mujeres E ­ x-­Prisioneras Políticas Sobrevivientes de la Red de Centros de Tortura Clandestinos del Régimen Militar de Pinochet, Declaración de Mujeres Ex Presas Políticas bajo la Dictadura (2004), 1–4 (p. 2), www.archivochile.com: http://www.archivochile.com/ Derechos_humanos/com_valech/doc_ddhh_politicas/hhdddocpolit0014.pdf (accessed 25 March 2015). My ­emphasis. 18 Nelly Richard, Crítica de la Memoria (1990 –2010) (Santiago: UDP, 2013), p. ­19. 19 Carlos Ruiz, ‘Democracia, Consenso y Memoria: Una Reflexión sobre la Experiencia Chilena’, in Nelly Richard (ed.), Políticas y Estéticas de la Memoria (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000), pp. 15–21 (pp. 17–18). 20 Richard, Crítica, p. ­109.

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21 Susan Franceschet, ‘Women in Politics in ­ Post-­ Transitional Democracies: The Chilean Case’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 3/2 (2001), 207–36 (213). 22 Patricio Aylwin, La Transición Chilena: Discursos Escogidos, Marzo 1990 – 1992 (Santiago: Andrés Bello, 1992), p. ­24. 23 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York and London: 1988), p. ­105. 24 Hutcheon, p. 81. My e­ mphasis. 25 Cecilia Sosa, Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Performances of Blood (Woodbridge and Rochester: Tamesis, 2014), p. ­1. 26 Steve J. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile 1989 –2006 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 335–47. 27 Susan Franceschet, ‘Continuity or Change? Gender Policy in the Bachelet Administration’, in Silvia Borzutzky and Gregory Bart Weeks (eds), The Bachelet Government: Conflict and Consensus in ­Post- ­Pinochet Chile (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), pp. 158–80 (pp. 158–9). 28 Marcela Ríos, ‘Seizing a Window of Opportunity? The Election of President Bachelet in Chile’, Politics and Gender, 4/3 (2008), 509–19 (517–18). 29 Alexander Wilde, ‘Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 31 (1999), 473–500. 30 Michelle Bachelet, ‘Discurso Presidenta Michelle Bachelet. Palacio de la Moneda. 11 de Marzo de 2006’, www.archivochile.com: http://www. archivochile.com/Chile_actual/Elecciones_2005/Bachelet/11_03_2006.pdf (accessed 23 September 2014), 1–7 (p. 3). 31 www.museodelamemoria.cl, ‘Sobre el Museo’, www.museodelamemoria.cl: http://www.museodelamemoria.cl­/el-­museo/sobre-­el-­museo/ (accessed 10 February 2013). 32 Patricia Bravo, ‘Entrevista. Memoria Viva. Marcia Scantlebury. Encargada del Proyecto Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos’, www.puntofinal.cl: http://www.puntofinal.cl/691/memoria. php (accessed 9 March 2015) (para. 4 of 12). 33 Quoted in Tamara Vidaurrázaga, ‘La (In)visibilización de las Mujeres en la Inauguración del Museo de la Memoria’, in Alessandra Burotto and Carmen Torres (eds), Y Votamos por Ella. Michelle Bachelet: Miradas Feministas (Santiago: Heinrich Böll Stiftung Cono Sur, 2010), pp. 101–2. 34 Michelle Bachelet, ‘Discurso de S. E. la Presidenta de la República, Michelle Bachelet, en Inauguración del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos’, www.museodelamemoria.cl: http://www.

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museodelamemoria.cl­/wp-­content/uploads/2011/11/discurso-­presidenta.pdf (accessed 23 September 2014), p. ­1. 35 Bachelet, ‘Discurso de S. E.’, p. 3. My e­ mphasis. 36 The AFDD was founded by twenty women searching for disappeared relatives with the support of the Comité P ­ ro-­Paz, the Vicaría de la Solidaridad and the Fundación de Ayuda Social de las Iglesias Cristianas (FASIC). It has been chaired by only three women: Sola Sierra (1977–99), Viviana Díaz (1999–2003) and Lorena Pizarro (2003–present). See Mario Garcés and Nancy Nicholls (eds), Para una Historia de los Derechos Humanos en Chile (Santiago: LOM, 2005). 37 Since 2001, Concertación governments have repeatedly enforced law 18.340 dictated during the military dictatorship, also known as Ley Antiterrorista del Estado, against Mapuche communities fighting for the recovery of ancestral lands in the south of Chile. In 2014, the Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos sanctioned the Chilean State for the enforcement of this law against Mapuche leaders. In January 2008, during the presidency of Michelle Bachelet, the young activist Matías Catrileo was shot in the back by an officer during the Mapuche occupation in Vilcún. The death of Catrileo was remembered by one of the women who screamed his name from a light tower during the inauguration of the Museo de la Memoria, while Bachelet remained in silence for several m ­ inutes. 38 Marcia Merino, Mi Verdad: Más Allá del Horror, Yo Acuso (Santiago: M. Merino Vega, 1993); Luz Arce, The Inferno (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 39 A difference between both testimonies, though, lies in the commercial interest in selling their stories. Marcia Merino did not publish her testimony with an established publishing house. Instead, she ­self-­published her testimony, printing her book with ATG SA in July 1993. Arce’s case is different. Her testimony was published by Editorial Planeta, and she sold all the rights of her testimony in Spanish to Editorial Planeta Chile SA. The book was officially presented to the press and the public at a suite of the Hotel Galerías in Santiago in November 1993. More than ten days after this event, two of the main newspapers in the country (La Tercera and La Época) were still reporting on the event organised by Planeta and the reactions of Arce, her family and friends, but also victims and relatives of victims present at the book launch. See María Eugenia Escobar, ‘El Infierno, de Luz Arce: Un Tramado de Unidades Discursivas’, Revista de la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades. Universidad de Chile, 13 (2000): http://web.uchile.cl/publicaciones/cyber/13/tx10.html#1v (accessed 16 March 2015). 40 Merino, Mi Verdad, p. ­8. 41 Arce, The Inferno, p. ­x ix.

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42 Richard, Crítica, pp. 106–9. 43 Fátima Sime, Carne de Perra (Santiago: LOM, 2009), p.  9; Arturo Fontaine, La Vida Doble (Barcelona: Tusquets, 2010), p. ­142. 44 See Nancy Guzmán, Romo, Confesiones de un Torturador (Santiago: Planeta, 2000) and Hernán Soto (ed.), Voces de Muerte I–II (Santiago: LOM, 1999). 45 Leigh A. Payne, ‘Collaborators and the Politics of Memory in Chile’, Human Rights Review, 3 (2001), 8–26. 46 Arce, The Inferno, p. ­x v. 47 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­143. 48 Arturo Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, trans. by Megan McDowell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. ­137. 49 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­82. 50 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­69. 51 In his famous text of 1965 ‘Man and Socialism in Cuba’, Ernesto Guevara stated his gendered vision of the ‘new man’ as an individual shaped by strong ideals of social responsibility, duty and sense of community in order to facilitate the encounter of human beings in the socialist order of things. The new man was defined by his or her ­community-­centredness and eagerness to sacrifice personal interests such as marital life or ­family: Our vanguard revolutionaries must idealise their love for the people, for the most hallowed causes, and make it one indivisible. They cannot descent, with small doses of daily affection, to the terrain where ordinary men put their love into practice … The leaders of the Revolution have children who do not learn to call their father with their first faltering words; they have wives who must be part of the general sacrifice of their lives to carry the Revolution to its destination; their friends are strictly limited to their comrades in revolution. There is no life outside the R ­ evolution.

See Ernesto Guevara, Man and Socialism in Cuba (New York: Atheneum, 1971), p. ­352. 52 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­299. 53 Arce, The Inferno, p. ­323 54 Sime, Carne, p. ­78. 55 Sime, Carne, p. ­83. 56 Faye Ran, ‘Modern Tragicomedy and the Fool’, in David Robb (ed.), Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 25–36. 57 M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. ­164. 58 Sime, Carne, p. ­104. 59 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­69.

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60 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­61. 61 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­92. 62 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­85. 63 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­94 64 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­87. 65 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­136. 66 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­130. 67 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. 195. The full passage in Nietzsche reads: ‘It is just as absurd to ask strength not to express itself as strength, not to be a desire to overthrow, crush, become master, to be a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumphs, as it is to ask weakness to express itself as strength’, in On Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. ­26. 68 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­192. 69 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p.  206. The full passage in Nietzsche reads: ‘With you I unlearned my faith in words and values and great names. When the devil sheds his skin, does his name not fall off too? For it too is skin. Perhaps the devil himself is – skin … “Nothing is true, all is permitted”: thus I persuaded myself. I plunged into the coldest waters, with head and heart. Oh how often I paid for it by standing there naked as a red crab!’, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. ­221. 70 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­203. 71 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. 167. The full passage in Nietzsche reads: ‘Why philosophers are slanderers … I fear it is still the Circe of philosophers, morality, that has here bewitched them into having to be slanderers forever – They believed in moral “truths,” they found there the supreme values – what else could they do but deny existence more firmly the more they got to know it? – For this existence is immoral – And this life depends upon immoral preconditions: and all morality denies life’, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), pp. 253–4. 72 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­162. 73 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­152. 74 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­147. 75 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­39. 76 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­32. 77 See Diamela Eltit, ‘Perder el sentido’, ‘Vivir ¿dónde?’ and ‘Cuerpos nómadas’, in Emergencias: Escritos sobre Literatura, Arte y Política (Santiago: Planeta/Ariel, 2000), pp. 48–78. 78 Sime, Carne, p. ­11. 79 Sime, Carne, p. ­21. 80 Sime, Carne, p. ­119.

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81 Cath Collins explains the consequences of the international arrest warrant handed to Pinochet during his stay in a London clinic in 1998, by Judge Baltazar Garzón and his investigations regarding the death of Spanish diplomat Carmelo Soria in 1 ­ 976: The ­five-­hundred-­day wrangling over Pinochet’s eventual return to Chile ran through a host of legal arguments about sovereign immunity and territoriality of law before coming to rest on the twin, and somewhat contradictory, contentions that Pinochet was in no fit state to be prosecuted, but could in any case be quite satisfactorily prosecuted in Chile. The existence of domestic cases [of human rights violations] was used by the Chilean government as evidence that Pinochet did not need to be extradited to Spain, as he could be impartially dealt with on home ­territory.

‘The Politics of Prosecutions’, in Cath Collins and others (eds), The Politics of Memory in Chile: From Pinochet to Bachelet (Boulder, CO and London: First Forum Press, 2013), pp. 61–90 (p. 73). 82 In Tomás Moulian’s analysis, this process not only involves the adoption of a particular economic model. The transformation of Chilean society implies a series of operations to secure the reproduction of the ‘infrastructure’ created by the dictatorship. Then, the Chilean State changed in a number of important aspects, but it remained the same at the core. The political regime changes from dictatorial rule to a ­pseudo-­democracy administered by a new political elite. See, Tomás Moulian, Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito (Santiago: LOM/ ARCIS, 1997), p. ­145. 83 Richard, Crítica, p. ­73. 84 Richard, Crítica, p. ­80. 85 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­39. 86 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, pp. 32–3. 87 Eltit, ‘Perder el sentido’, p. ­51. 88 Patricia Espinosa, ‘El Infierno de Luz Arce: La Escritura como Simulacro’, in Lorena Amaro (ed.), Estéticas de la Intimidad (Santiago: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2009), p. ­98. 89 Sime, Carne, p. ­74. 90 Sime, Carne, p. ­5. 91 Sime, Carne, p. ­77. 92 Sime, Carne, p. ­77. 93 Olea, Mujeres y Colaboración, p. ­12. 94 Sime, Carne, p. ­5. 95 Sime, Carne, p. ­7. 96 Sime, Carne, p. ­16. 97 Sime, Carne, p. ­103. 98 Sime, Carne, p. ­120.

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  99 Poder Ejecutivo, Ministerio de Justicia, Subsecretaría del Interior, Decreto Supremo Nº 355: crea Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación. 25 de abril 1990: https://pdh.minjusticia.gob.cl­/wp-­content/uploads/2015/ 12/Creacion- ­Comision-­R ettig.pdf (accessed 21 December 2015), p. 1. My ­emphasis. 100 Michelle Bachelet, ‘Discurso Presidenta Michelle Bachelet Palacio de la Moneda 11 de Marzo de 2006’, ­www.archivochile.com: http://archivochile.com/Chile_actual/Elecciones_2005/Bachelet/11_03_2006.pdf (accessed 23 September 2014), p. 1. My ­emphasis. 101 Michelle Bachelet, ‘Discurso de S. E. la Presidenta de la República, Michelle Bachelet, en Inauguración del Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos’, www.museodelamemoria.cl: http://www.museodelamemoria.cl­/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2011/11/discurso-­p residenta.pdf (accessed 23 September 2014), p. ­2. 102 Olea, Mujeres y Colaboración, p. ­32. 103 In addition, El Infierno has been translated into German (1994). 104 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­39. 105 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­32. 106 Arce, The Inferno, p. ­322. 107 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­39. 108 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­32. 109 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­40. 110 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­33. 111 Irene/Lorena discusses, for example, the executions of General Carol Urzúa (1983), Colonel Roger Vergara (1980), DINA agent Roberto Fuentes Morrison (1991) and Senator Jaime Guzmán (1991). She also mentions the operations Carrizal Bajo (1986) and Operation Siglo XX (1987) carried out by the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR) in order to illegally introduce armament in Chile and assassinate Augusto Pinochet, ­respectively. 112 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­132. 113 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­126. 114 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­126. 115 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­120. 116 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­131. 117 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­125. 118 Fontaine, Vida Doble, p. ­129. 119 Fontaine, La Vida Doble: A Novel, p. ­123.

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Chapter ­4   1 See Patricia M. Chuchryk, ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy: The Women’s Movement in Chile’, in Jane S. Jaquette (ed.), The Women’s Movement in Latin America (Boulder, CO, San Francisco and Oxford: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 65–107.   2 Steve J. Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile, 1989–2006 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 273–323.   3 Viviana Díaz, ‘Discurso. Santiago 28 March 2012’, www.indh.cl: http:// www.indh.cl­/ wp - ­c ontent/uploads/2012/03/Discurso -­V iviana.pdf (accessed 4 April 2014) (p. 8).   4 Isabel Allende B., ‘Discurso. Santiago 10 September 2003’, www.isabelallendebussi.cl: http://www.isabelallendebussi.cl/contenidos.php?idnota=6 (accessed 4 April 2014) (para. 6 of 10).  5 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. ­5.  6 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy’, in Mieke Bal (ed.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), pp. 3–23.   7 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘The 1.5 Generation: Thinking about Child Survivors and the Holocaust’, American Imago, 59/3 (2002), 277–295 (277).  8 Cecilia Sosa, ‘Queering Acts of Mourning in the Aftermath of Argentina’s Dictatorship: The Mother of Plaza de Mayo and Los Rubios’, in Francesca Lessa and Vincent Druliolle (eds), The Memory of State Terrorism in the Southern Cone (New York: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 63–85.  9 The phrase ‘postmemorial work’ in Hirsch refers to memorial productions of the ‘generation after’. These gestures strive to reactivate and ­re-­embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures. They do so by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. Therefore, less directly affected participants can become engaged in the generation of postmemory. As a consequence, this type of memory can persist even after all participants and even their familial descendants are gone. See, Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, pp. 29–34. 10 Susana Kaiser, Postmemories of Terror: A New Generation Copes with the Legacy of the ‘Dirty War’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. ­81. 11 Pía Barros, ‘El lugar del otro’, in El Lugar del Otro (Santiago: Editorial Asterión, 2010), p. ­23. 12 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­10.

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13 Steve Stern, Reckoning with Pinochet: The Memory Question in Democratic Chile (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 143–210. 14 Alexander Wilde, ‘Irruptions of Memory: Expressive Politics in Chile’s Transition to Democracy’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 31/2 (1999), 473–500. 15 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­22. 16 Nona Fernández, Fuenzalida (Santiago: Mondadori, 2012), p. ­33. 17 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­138. 18 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­12. 19 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­39. 20 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­25. 21 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­20. 22 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­20. 23 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­17. 24 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­63. 25 María Elena Valenzuela, La Mujer en el Chile Militar (Santiago: Ediciones Chile y América, 1987), p. ­33. 26 Raúl Silva Henríquez and Ascanio Cavallo, Memorias III (Santiago: Ediciones Copygraph, 1994), pp. 45–50. 27 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­63. 28 Hirsch, Generation, p. ­36. 29 Hirsch, Generation, p. ­39. 30 Eugenio Dittborn’s series Su Condición (1978) is perhaps the best example of such practices. A complete analysis of Dittborn’s works can be found in Ronald Kay, El Espacio de Acá: A Propósito de la Pintura y la Gráfica de Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago: Ediciones Metales Pesados, 2005). 31 Nelly Richard, ‘­Imagen-­Recuerdo y Borraduras’, in Nelly Richard (ed.), Políticas y Estéticas de la Memoria (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2000), pp.165–72 (p. 167). 32 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­16. 33 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­9. 34 For an extensive analysis of the role of the Edwards family in Allende’s fall and support to Pinochet’s coup, see also Ignacio Agüero’s documentary film El Diario de Agustín (2008). 35 Gustavo G ­ onzález-­Rodríguez, ‘The Media in Chile: The Restoration of Democracy and the Subsequent Concentration of Media Ownership’, in Jairo Lugo (ed.), The Media in Latin America (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), pp. 61–77. 36 Kristin Sorensen, Media, Memory, and Human Rights in Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 105–32. 37 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­17. 38 Hirsch, Generation, p. ­37. 39 Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 2002), p. ­125.

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40 Peter Buse, ‘Surely Fades Away: Polaroid Photography and the Contradictions of Cultural Value’, Photographies, 1/2 (2008), 221–38. 41 General Fernando Matthei was appointed member of the military junta in 1977 as the representative of the Chilean Air ­Force. 42 Michelle Bachelet, ‘Discurso. Conmemoración 40 Años. Santiago, 9 September 2013’, www.michellebachelet.cl: http://michellebachelet.cl/ discurso-40-­anos- ­museo- ­de-­la- ­memoria- ­y -­los- ­derechos-­humanos/ (accessed 3 April 2014). 43 See Hugo Vezzetti’s discussion of the ‘teoría de los dos demonios’, invoked by Matthei, in relation to the Argentinian case in Pasado y Presente: Guerra, Dictadura y Sociedad en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2002). 44 Evelyn Matthei, ‘Reflexión e invitación a los 40 años del Golpe Militar. Santiago, 11 de Septiembre 2013’, www.theclinic.cl: http://www. theclinic.cl/2013/09/09­/la- ­r eflexion-­d e- ­e velyn-­m atthei-­a -40-anos-­d el-­ golpe/ (accessed 3 April 2014). 45 Cooperativa.cl, ‘Evelyn Matthei: Yo no tengo que pedir perdón’, www. cooperativa.cl:http://www.cooperativa.cl/noticias/pais­/dd-­hh/evelyn-­matthei-­ yo-­no-­tengo-­que- ­pedir- ­perdon/2013–08–27/111742.html (accessed 3 April 2014) (para. 3 of 5). 46 Linda Stone, Kinship and Gender (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2010), pp. 20–1. 47 Sosa, Queering Acts, p. ­151. 48 Ana Amado, ‘Herencias: Generaciones y Duelo en las Políticas de la Memoria’, Revista Iberoamericana, 202 (2003), 137–53 (143). 49 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­31. 50 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­46. 51 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­58. 52 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­24. 53 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­14. 54 Laura Tedesco and Jonathan R. Barton, The State of Democracy in Latin America: ­Post-­transitional Conflicts in Argentina and Chile (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 95–103. 55 See Alejandro Michelena, Viejo Café Tortoni: Historia de las Horas (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Corregidor, 2008). 56 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­4 4. 57 Fernández, Fuenzalida, pp. 41–2. 58 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­18. 59 Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 1–24. 60 Landsberg, Prosthetic, pp. 141–55. 61 Barros, ‘El lugar’, pp. 24–5. 62 Barros, ‘El lugar’, p. ­43.

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63 The museum was created by initiative of national and international artists after a meeting in Santiago in 1971. Its creation was as a gesture of support to the social and political project carried out during Allende’s administration. See www.mssa.cl: http://www.mssa.cl­/sobre-­el-­ museo/ (accessed 25 April 2014). 64 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­24. 65 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­242. 66 Fernández, Fuenzalida, pp. 245–6. 67 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­60. 68 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­77. 69 Fernández, Fuenzalida, p. ­256.

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Index

11 September 1973 8 1970s 82 1980s 82, 83, 127, 132 1990s 2, 3, 21, 22, 35–7, 50, 58, 60, 98, 123, 156 2000s 3, 10 Academia de Guerra Aérea 94 Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (AFDD) 9, 77, 97, 123, 124 Agrupación de Mujeres ExPrisioneras Políticas 91 Alfonsín, Raúl 145 Alighieri, Dante 107 Allende, Isabel 124, 125, 155 Allende, Salvador 5, 8, 9, 12, 57, 95, 98, 124, 139, 150, 158 Altamirano, Carlos 26 Amado, Ana 141 Argentina 17, 64, 76, 78, 81, 82, 94, 123, 126, 128, 131, 141 Atacama 30, 31 Avelar, Idelber 26, 28, 58 Bachelet, Alberto 94 Bachelet, Michelle 11, 12, 18, 19, 92–8, 108, 118, 139, 146, 155 Barros, Pía 1, 4, 18, 60, 125, 127, 131, 135, 141, 150, 151, 155, 156, 159 Beauvoir, Simone 82–5 Becker, Nubia 3 Berenguer, Carmen 15, 60 Brito, Eugenia 15, 26, 60 Café Tortoni 145 Calbris, Geneviève 68 Calle Santa Fe 3

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Calveiro, Pilar 63 Cánovas, Rodrigo 14, 15, 26 Carne de Perra 4, 9, 17, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98, 100, 102, 108–11, 113, 114, 116–18, 122, 157–61 Castillo, Carmen 3 Catholic Church 14, 21, 82, 84, 109, 120, 158, 160 Centro de Estudios Públicos 89 Cervantes, Miguel de 105, 106 Chile Coup 7–9, 14, 15, 19, 23, 24, 43, 50, 57, 58, 59, 60, 94, 100, 124, 132, 133, 139, 140, 156 Dictatorship 1, 8–10 Transition 2, 4, 8, 10, 12–14, 39, 41, 43, 54, 82, 89, 92, 93, 100, 108–11, 120, 122, 139 post-dictatorship 25, 37, 41, 54, 110, 157 Chilean Communist Party 3, 13, 63, 77, 123 Chilean left 4, 17, 59, 158, 159 Cohen, Gregory 59 Collaboration 3, 18, 88, 98–102, 106, 108–11, 113–15, 119, 122 and women 3, 4, 16, 17, 18, 87, 89, 98–100, 102, 106, 108–10, 113, 114, 120, 159, 160 and men 100 Collins, Cath 11, 12 Collyer, Jaime 59 Comando Conjunto Subversivo 154 Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (also National Truth and Reconciliation Commission) 1, 21, 92, 108

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200 Index Comisión Nacional sobre Desaparición de Personas (CONADEP) 145 Comisión Nacional sobre Prisión Política y Tortura 21, 91, 124 Comité Pro-Paz 9 Concertación de partidos por la democracia 10, 18, 90, 92–4, 97, 105, 108–11, 113, 118, 119, 121, 122, 156, 157, 159 Consorcio Peridístico de Chile (COPESA) 137 Contreras Maluje, Carlos 154 Contreras, Gonzalo 16 De la Parra, Marco Antonio 59 Daughter(s) 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 30, 33, 36, 46, 50, 70, 71, 77, 84, 94, 100, 101, 105, 123–40, 142, 143, 146–61 and memory 16, 123–6, 155 and dictatorship 18, 19, 21, 77, 94, 123–6, 146, 147 and post-memory 126–34, 136–40, 142, 147 and kinship 19, 126, 127, 139, 140–4, 146, 147 Departamento de Estudios Humanísticos 26 Dictatorship 1, 5, 7–10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 22–5, 28–30, 39, 47, 49, 54, 56–9, 62, 69, 74, 85, 93, 95, 103, 108, 110, 111, 120, 121, 125–8, 130, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 140, 146, 147, 152–5, 157, 161 and memory 8–10 and post-dictatorship 25, 37, 41, 54, 110, 157 and fiction 14–20 Di Liscia, María 11 Díaz Eterovic, Ramón 59, 60 Díaz, Viviana 123–5, 155 Dittborn, Eugenio 26, 135 Dónde estás Constanza 16 Edwards family 137 El Bisel del Espejo: mi Ventana 3

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El Desierto 4, 9, 16, 17, 21–5, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 42, 46–8, 51–5, 158, 160 El Infierno 3, 99–101 El Lugar del Otro 18 ‘El lugar del otro’ 4, 18, 125–9, 132, 134, 135, 140–6, 148, 150, 155, 159 El Mercurio 137 El Nadador 16 Eltit, Diamela 1, 4, 9, 15–17, 24–6, 28–30, 36, 37, 39, 41, 54, 56, 57, 60–2, 66, 68, 78, 79, 81, 86, 87, 108, 113, 156–8 Errázuriz, Virginia 135 Fariña, Soledad 15 Fernández Nona 1, 4, 18, 19, 125, 126, 135, 146, 155, 156, 158, 161 Fontaine, Arturo 1, 4, 9, 17, 23, 89, 90, 93, 99, 100, 102, 109, 119, 121, 122, 156, 159 Foucault, Michel 52 Franco, Jean 28 Franz, Carlos 1, 4, 9, 16, 22, 23, 25, 33, 47, 49–55, 58, 89, 156, 158 Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez 63, 154 Fuentes Morrison, Roberto 154 Fuenzalida 4, 18, 19, 125, 127, 130, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 142, 144, 146, 148, 151, 155, 158, 161 Funa 88 Gender 5, 11, 13, 26, 27, 29, 61, 84, 85, 92–5, 101, 122, 160 and memory 6, 8, 57, 84, 89, 93, 101, 103, 107, 108, 113, 119 and violence 17, 22, 91 and identity 12–14, 57, 63, 64, 68, 74, 84, 86, 101, 102, 105, 122, 127, 129, 131 Girard, René 32 Goic, Cedomil 60 González, Daniuska 89

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Index 201 González, Pía 1, 4, 17, 56, 57, 61, 69, 72, 81, 86, 156 Grau, Olga 85 Green, Mary 24 Guevara, Ernesto 71, 101, 106, 107 Halbwachs, Maurice 6, 7 Hirsch, Marianne 125, 127, 134, 138, 150 Hite, Katherine 3, 11, 12 Hopenhayn, Martín 82 Human rights 1, 2, 4, 9, 10, 12, 16–19, 22, 25, 35, 53, 71, 92, 94–8, 102, 123, 124, 140, 150 ICTUS 14, 15 Jaime Guzmán Memorial 12 Jamás el Fuego Nunca 4, 9, 17, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 76, 78–81, 86, 87, 157, 158, 160 Jelin, Elizabeth 10, 11 Jocelyn-Holt, Alfredo 10 Joignant, Alfredo 11 Kadir, Djelal 29 Kaiser, Susana 128 Kay, Ronald 26 Kirkwood, Julieta 5, 82 La Flaca Alejandra: Vidas y Muertes de una Mujer en Chile 3 La Tercera 137 La Verdad y la Honestidad se Pagan Caro 3 La Vida Doble 4, 9, 17, 18, 89, 90, 92, 93, 98, 100–2, 105, 108, 109, 111, 113, 119, 122, 159–61 La Vida es Hoy 3 Lagos, María I. 66 Lagos, Ricardo 21, 96, 124 Landsberg, Alison 148–50 Leiva, Ricardo 89 Lenin (Vladimir Ilich) 106, 107 Lentin, Ronit 90, 91, 119 Leppe, Carlos 26, 135

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Libreta de Familia 4, 17, 56, 57, 68–70, 76, 81, 82, 86, 87, 158, 159, 161 Lihn, Enrique 14 Lillo, Mario 15, 16, 58, 59, 90 Los Vigilantes 16, 17, 24, 25, 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 54 Lumpérica 16, 17, 24–8, 30, 31, 33–7, 54, 157 Madariaga, Mónica 3, 12, 13 Madres de Plaza de Mayo 76–8, 81, 123, 141 Malpass, Michael 31 Maquieira, Diego 15 Marín, Gladys 3, 12, 13, 63 Martí, José 106 Martínez, Juan Luis 15 Martínez, Tomás Eloy 23 Matthei, Evelyn 19, 139, 140, 146, 155 Matthei, Fernando 139 Memorial del Detenido Desaparecido y del Ejecutado Político 88 Memory 1–4, 6–13, 15–20, 25, 31, 35, 38, 40–5, 51, 53–9, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 69, 76–8, 81, 82, 84–7, 89–99, 101–12, 117–27, 129, 131, 134–7, 139, 140, 142, 144–6, 148–53, 155–9, 161 and agency 1, 10, 16–19, 41, 98, 120 and testimony 3, 13, 44, 46–9, 53–4, 63, 98, 99, 101, 113, 119, 161 and women 1, 2, 10–12, 21, 55, 84, 92 and human rights 4, 9, 10, 12, 16–19, 22, 94–8, 102, 123, 140, 150 and kinship 19, 126, 127, 139, 140–4, 146, 147 of the dictatorship 1, 7–10, 12, 16, 19, 54, 56, 62, 125, 126, 128, 133, 134, 140, 153, 155 politics 1, 76, 77, 93, 111, 125, 157

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202 Index narratives 4, 16, 57, 76, 82, 92, 97, 119, 123, 126, 131, 135, 137, 139, 140, 142, 146, 151, 153, 155, 157 discourses 2, 6, 11, 12, 16, 17, 42, 56, 86, 89, 93, 96, 101–3, 105, 107, 108, 117–21, 127, 149, 159, 161 culture(s) 6, 7 collective 6, 7, 15, 16, 58, 59, 98, 119, 142, 156, 157, 160, 161 in Chilean fictions (of the dictatorship) 15, 54, 58, 59 struggle(s) 18, 87, 94, 97, 123, 125, 139 question 20, 94, 123 irruption(s) of 95, 129 prosthetic 148–51 Mera, Jorge 36 Merino, Marcia 3, 51, 99, 100, 108, 109, 111, 113, 119, 160 Militancy 18, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 76–80, 83, 86, 105, 107, 137, 158 Mi Verdad 3, 99, 100, 119 Montes, Cristián 89 Montoneros 63 Mother(s) 2, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 24, 27, 37, 40, 41, 44, 56, 57, 71, 76–87, 94, 98, 101, 104, 105, 120, 123, 125–35, 138, 140, 144–6, 157–9, 161 See also motherhood 2, 22, 31, 57, 62, 66, 76–8, 80–7, 100, 159 Movimiento Contra la Tortura Sebastián Acevedo 9 Museo de la Memoria y de los Derechos Humanos 12, 18, 96, 118 Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende 150 Nietzsche, Friedrich 42–4, 46, 106, 107 Olea, Catalina 90, 116, 119 Oleza, Joan 69 On Collective Memory 6

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Opazo, Cristián 59, 60 Ortega, Julio 26 Oses, Darío 59 Patriarchy 4–6, 42, 52, 53, 61, 156 and memory 5–8 Patricio Aylwin 1, 14, 35, 36, 91–3, 117, 145 Peris, Jaume 90 Picó family 137 Pinochet, Augusto 1–5, 8–12, 15, 17–19, 23, 36, 39, 41, 56–9, 61, 71–6, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 89, 92, 94–6, 99, 100, 106, 108, 110, 111, 120, 122, 126, 133, 137, 140, 153, 156–9 Pizarro, Lorena 123–5, 155 Plaza de la Constitución 12 Political violence 1, 8, 21, 24, 25, 42, 58, 89, 91, 94, 98, 100, 102, 109, 123, 135 Politics of memory 1–4, 10–12, 18, 25, 35, 43, 44, 55, 90, 92–4, 99, 109, 110, 111, 119–22, 159 Post-dictatorship 25, 37, 41, 54, 110, 157 Postmemory 125–7, 129, 138, 150 and agency 19, 126, 127, 134, 135, 145–8, 151, 155, 158 Radrigán, Juan 15 Recuerdos de una Mirista 3 Rettig Report 1, 2, 22 Rettig, Raúl 1 Richard, Nelly 12–14, 25, 63, 82, 92, 99, 111, 135 Riggs Bank 140 Rivas, Francisco 59 Rodríguez Elizondo, José 23 Rodríguez, Guillermo 59 Rojas, Carmen 3, 51 Román, José 59 Rosasco, José Luis 16 Ruiz, Carlos 92 Scantlebury, Marcia 96 Scarry, Elaine 25–8, 31, 47, 48

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Index 203 Silva Henríquez, Raúl 10 Sime, Fátima 1, 4, 9, 17, 89, 90, 93, 98–100, 102, 109, 114–16, 118, 122, 156–9 Sontag, Susan 138 Sorensen, Kristin 137 Sosa, Cecilia 19, 94, 97, 126, 141 Spielberg, Steven 149 Spotorno, Radomiro 59 Stern, Steve J. 12, 13, 17, 43, 123, 124, 129 Stone, Linda 141 Suleiman, Susan Rubin 126 Szczaranski, Clara 3, 12, 13, 14 Taylor, Diana 77 The Collective Memory 6 Thomas, Dylan 107 Transition (in Chile) 2, 4, 8, 10, 12–14, 18, 39, 41, 43, 54, 82, 89, 92, 93, 100, 108–11, 119, 120, 122, 139 Tromben, Carlos 59 Una Mujer en Villa Grimaldi 3 Universidad de Chile 26 Valech Commission 22 Valech Report 22 Valech, Sergio 21, 22

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Valenzuela, María Elena 133 Vicaría de la Solidaridad 10 Vidaurrázaga, Tamara 80 Villa Grimaldi 3, 12, 96 Violence 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 17, 18, 21, 22, 27–33, 35, 37, 40, 42–4, 47, 49–51, 53–6, 58, 61, 64, 66, 71, 72, 77, 82, 89, 91, 92, 94, 98–100, 102, 105, 107–9, 112, 114, 123, 125, 129, 135, 140, 141, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152, 156, 157, 159, 160 gendered 17, 22, 91 political 1, 8, 21, 24, 25, 42, 58, 89, 91, 94, 98, 100, 102, 109, 123, 135 Walby, Sylvia 4–6 Waugh, Patricia 90 Wilde, Alexander 2, 95 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 45, 46 Wives 2, 13, 21, 27, 56, 61, 77, 85, 91, 157, 158 women’s memories 1, 2, 10–12, 21, 55, 92 wounded family 19, 94, 97, 102, 126, 141, 146, 147 Zurita, Raúl 14, 15, 26

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