Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction

Palabra de Mujer

Gustavo Carvajal

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781786838056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

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). Through the 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.

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 two-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 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 violence.

El Desierto is structured around two crucial moments in the life of its main character, Laura Larco. First, the novel depicts Laura’s 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 first-hand recollec-tions 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 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 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 politics.

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 post-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 context.

Rituals of violence and memory

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 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 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 pre-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 v...