Affect and Ethics in Latin American Literature and Film (1969-1991)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE TESTIMONIAL WORLD: AFFECT AND ETHICS IN LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM (1969-1991) A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Cora Starker Gorman Malone September 2013 The Dissertation of Cora Malone is approved: ____________________________________ Professor Norma Klahn, chair ____________________________________ Professor Wlad Godzich ____________________________________ Professor Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal _____________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Cora Starker Gorman Malone 2013 Table of Contents Abstract iv Acknowledgements vi Introduction 1 Chapter I Fragmented Testimony: La noche de Tlatelolco and Rojo amanecer 20 Chapter II Testimonial Readers/Writerly Testimonials? The Ethical Demands of a Literary Approach 63 Chapter III Characters and Witnesses: Prison Narratives, Women’s Writing and the Dirty War 99 Chapter IV Film as Testimonial Text in the Southern Cone: Affect and Narrative in La historia oficial and Que Bom Te Ver Viva 145 Conclusion 192 Bibliography 201 iii Abstract Cora Starker Gorman Malone The Testimonial World: Affect and Ethics in Latin American Literature and Film (1969-1991) This dissertation explores how theories of affect and ethics inform our understanding of the way testimonial texts communicate with readers. Adopting a broad definition of “the testimonial world” to encompass fictional and documentary literature and film, the pages that follow focus on testimonial work in Latin America from 1969-1991. By exploring testimonial’s narrative qualities, historical relationship to ethnography and memoir, and attention to gender and ethnicity, this study considers the symbolic re-representation of violence in testimonial texts and the ethics (and the reader’s ethical position) they advocate, particularly in positioning the reader as responsible to an “other” who is a victim of violence. I investigate literary and filmic texts that respond to the violence of systemic socioeconomic marginalization as well as the imprisonment, death and disappearance, traumatic and post-traumatic experience brought about by state-sponsored violence; these texts span various regions and genres, and include La noche de Tlateloco and Rojo amanecer (Mexico), Si me permiten hablar (Bolivia), El zorro de arriba y el zorro de abajo (Peru), Conversación al sur (Uruguay and Argentina), The Little School, Pasos bajo el agua and La historia oficial (Argentina) and Que Bom Te Ver Viva (Brazil). One of the concerns brought to the fore through this project is whether there is a fundamental difference with the discussion of affect in testimonial work due iv to its relationship to real-world violence. I argue that through a comparative rereading of testimonial attentive to the deterritorialized play of affect, these texts reconceive of distinctions between the public and private spheres, collective and individual stories, and the self and its responsibility to the other. My reading demonstrates that the intersubjective qualities of the testimonial imaginary allow it to articulate an ethics of readership in the communication of violence. v Acknowledgements This dissertation would not be possible without the support of many mentors, colleagues, friends and family members, though all the faults of this work are mine alone. I would like to express special thanks to my advisor, Norma Klahn, for the leading role her teaching and scholarship has played in the development of my approach to the study of Latin American literature, and for responding to every draft of this project with thoughtful observations, additional bibliography and stimulating questions. Without her intellectual guidance it would not have reached fruition and I am grateful to be her student. I would also like to thank Wlad Godzich for teaching me through challenging questions to demand more from my own scholarship; his sage advice helped shape this dissertation from its inception and has seen it through to the conclusion. Additional thanks to Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal, whose seminar furthered my approach to Latin American film and who provided crucial assistance in this project. I would also like to thank Julianne Burton-Carvajal for her many contributions to my study of Latin American film, and Catherine Ramírez, Kirsten Silva-Gruesz, Vilashini Cooppan and Megan Thomas for their instrumental guidance in seminars and independent research. I am grateful to the Literature Department for its fellowship support of this dissertation in its early stages and to the department staff, especially Emily and Carol. I also offer a long overdue thanks to Marina Pérez de Mendiola of Scripps College and Susana Chávez-Silverman of Pomona College for mentoring my undergraduate work and fostering my interest in Latin American literature. vi I would like to give special recognition as well to those who have volunteered their time to help me through my work at various stages, including Pamela, Janelle, Doug, Tom, Laurel, Shane, Gina, Michael, Jeff and Kelli, and to Carrie who offered childcare when needed most. A heartfelt thanks to the mentors in my family who motivated me to finish graduate school, including Jeff, Janet, Ginni, Pamela and my parents, although my father is not here to see this project in its completion. My daughter Fiona provided much inspiration and joy in my life during these years of juggling scholarship and motherhood; my love and sincere gratitude to her and Nicholas, who has always listened to my ideas with patience and encouraged me to continue in spite of whatever seeming obstacles emerged. vii Introduction “De la ‘verdad’ no es dueño el escritor sino el lector, el que va a re-interpretar esa interpretación hecha por el que escribió la historia” -Alicia Kozameh “¿Qué tipo de discurso—verbal o icónico, narrativo o teatral—puede producir una ‘transformación interior’ que sensibilice al espectador para la recepción de ese tema terrible: la muerte anónima, la muerte sin escena?” (Schnaith 26).1 This question, posed by Nelly Schnaith in “La muerte sin escena” (1997 and 2000), speaks to the core of testimonial endeavors—that they may, by some manner, effectively communicate to the reader (receptor?) an experience of violence that escapes communication. Through a critical rereading of Latin American testimonial work, my project takes the testimonial world as a subject/object of investigation, and examines the construction of testimonial texts and the ways they—and the affective lives of their characters—interact with readers. Of course, “testimonial world” does not derive from a standard glossary of literary criticism. Part of the task of the chapters that follow will be to help articulate through examples what this term might encompass and how this sort of inquiry relates to a more broadly conceived relationship between readers (or viewers, in the case of film) and literary or filmic texts. For the moment, I 1 What sort of discourse—verbal or iconic, narrative or theatrical—could produce an ‘internal transformation’ that would sensitize the spectator for the reception of that terrible topic: anonymous death, unstaged death?” Translations will be provided in footnotes from English versions of the text when available unless noted. In the absence of an English version, translations will be my own. 1 would like to tentatively describe the testimonial world as the imaginative space (wherein the distinctions between fiction and “truth” are momentarily suspended) for encounters with referential (related to real-world) accounts of violence. The specific texts that provide examples of the testimonial world in this project originate from various points in Latin America—Mexico, the Andes and the Southern Cone—during a similar time period characterized by violent confrontation between military governments and marginalized populations (and/or revolutionaries). The primary texts span from 1968, with the repression of the student movement in Mexico, to the late 1980s and early 1990s, which saw attempts at reconciliation and redemocratization in the Southern Cone. Each of the texts I have chosen in some way challenges dominant societal narratives, seeking to communicate stories hitherto excluded in authoritarian discourses. The ability to communicate—to speak and to be seen and heard—is of particular importance to these texts, given that many of them deal with the literal “disappearing” of persons (and their bodies) by agents of the state, and all address the invisibility of those socioeconomically and politically marginalized. In this regard, the testimonial text (even when claiming to present a fictionalized account),2 almost more than the physical monument, provides a locus for memory and the discursive space to engage in an active process of remembering, one 2 As mentioned above, this study intends to approach the testimonial world by considering together both texts that stake a claim to documentary truth (such as Si me permiten hablar) and those whose authors acknowledge the goal of a more poetic truth (such as Pasos bajo el agua)—recognizing the complexity of drawing distinctions between documentation and fiction in testimonial, particularly when a prologue or introduction encourages the reader to approach a text as fiction based on the lived experience of a speaker and/or her community. 2 that involves reconsidering one’s orientation to the past and an imagined future. While this study approaches these

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