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Rethinking Disappearance in Chilean Post-Coup Narratives A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Alexis Lynn Howe IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Dr. Ana Forcinito May 2011 © Alexis Howe 2011 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee members Ana Forcinito, Nicholas Spadaccini, Raúl Marrero-Fente, and Barbara Frey for their guidance and feedback throughout my career as a graduate student. A very special thank you to Ana Forcinito, who took over as my advisor, without hesitation, at a very difficult time and gently but persistently nudged me to continue with my project. I am also eternally grateful for the guidance of René Jara, who helped me to come to this research topic and offered me encouragement during my moments of doubt. Thank you to my family, especially my mother, for your love and encouragement. As I have learned during this process, an empathetic listener can make all the difference. To my husband, Dustin, there are no words to describe how much your unconditional support during these last several years means to me. Your love and friendship give me strength at times when I think I have no more. To everyone who offered support to me during this process, while these words feel inadequate to describe my gratitude, I truly thank you. i Dedication This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of René Jara, who was my scholarly mentor, friend, and a beautiful human being. ii Abstract This dissertation explores Chilean narratives produced since the 1973 coup d‟état (from the dictatorship and post-dictatorship periods) and analyzes representations of disappearance, which range from the institutionalized practice of enforced disappearance during the dictatorship, to the erasure of inconvenient histories and memories during the transition to democracy, and the persistent vanishing of marginal subjects in neoliberal democratic Chile. Focusing on the work of Ana Vásquez, Luz Arce, Ariel Dorfman, Roberto Bolaño, and Diamela Eltit, who present disappearance in numerous forms and in a variety of genres (novels, testimonio, drama, film, and texts that blur generic boundaries), I argue that, as one of many authoritarian continuities in democratic Chile, disappearance persists in the present. My study begins to articulate other manifestations of disappearance that extend beyond the notion of enforced disappearance as a phenomenon contained during the dictatorship period, and constitutes a space for rethinking disappearance in neoliberal democracies. iii Table of Contents List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………..... v Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1. Ana Vásquez‟s Abel Rodríguez y sus hermanos and Luz Arce‟s El infierno: What Remains for Survivors of Enforced Disappearance? ……………...………..….…41 Chapter 2. Ariel Dorfman‟s La muerte y la doncella and “A Promise to the Dead”: Disappeared in Plain Sight, the Victim who is Simultaneously Visible and Invisible......98 Chapter 3. Roberto Bolaño‟s Estrella distante: The Impossibility of Narrating Disappearance………………….…………………………………………...….….……163 Chapter 4. Diamela Eltit‟s El padre mío and Diamela Eltit and Paz Errazuriz‟s El infarto del alma: The Vanishing of Unsightly and Nonproductive Bodies ………….………...202 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………………..…241 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………...……......249 iv List of Figures 1. A couple posing for the camera outside of a state mental institution in Pinel, Chile. Paz Errázuriz. El infarto del alma 218 2. The halls inside a state mental institution in Pinel, Chile. Paz Errázuriz. El infarto del alma 225 3. A couple displaying their affection in the same institution as above. Paz Errázuriz. El infarto del alma 236 v Introduction In a desolate desert in the Chilean north, the remains of a man who has been disappeared since the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship are finally unearthed. A group of family members observe in silence. Their emotions are still very raw. It appears that this loss is not a part of the past for them, but instead a part of the present. A woman, the mother of the victim, wears a photograph of her son around her neck. While she is unsure of what kind of healing the unearthing of his remains will bring, she claims that she feels his presence, and that she feels calmer just knowing that he is there. The woman‟s other son, the victim‟s brother, also speaks about his loss. His voice shakes and he looks up at the sky as he struggles to maintain his composure. At one point it becomes too difficult for him to continue speaking. This opening scene of Patricio Guzmán‟s documentary, “El caso Pinochet” (2001), shows how Chile‟s painful past is not really past at all, but still very much a part of the present. While it has been over two decades since the transition to democracy began, a fractured postdictatorial Chile continues to be haunted by the Pinochet military regime. While some see the need to uncover the horrors carried out during the dictatorship and question the traces of this period that persist in the post-dictatorship, others are convinced that the best thing for the country is to forget and move forward. It is well known that the dictatorship was marked by the enforced disappearance of thousands of individuals. The question, then, arises: what traces of disappearance remain in the present? More specifically, in what ways does disappearance continue to haunt post-dictatorial Chile? 1 In addition to the obvious impacts of this crime, what are the other less apparent effects that it has had on contemporary Chilean society? Since the coup, literature has played an essential role in denouncing and resisting injustice as well as in remembering that which is in danger of being forgotten. Truth was one of the principle victims of the dictatorship, which used arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance, and execution to install a deep-rooted fear and institutionalized silence in the Chilean community. Since the official discourse of the regime denied the voice of the repressed, literature played an important role in representing this voice – unlike the singular voice of the dictatorship, the literature that arose to denounce the repression of the regime presented a multiplicity of voices. Literary texts have served as a means to record and preserve the experiences of marginal subjects, thereby rescuing from oblivion those stories that had been excluded from the official versions of history. Through literature, writers have been able to speak out against injustice and document human rights violations, which were skillfully concealed and systematically denied by the military regime. In some cases, the very act of writing has served as a cathartic exercise and a means of working through an individual‟s own personal trauma. Through the use of literary devices and poetic language, artists have been able to achieve new ways of communicating amid the utter breakdown of language and meaning that resulted from the coup. This way they are able to provide a more effective means of representing (or, better said, attempting to represent) that which escapes words. In this way, literature is uniquely capable of representing reality, of bringing about a representation of that which 2 is otherwise difficult to see, that which is hidden, that which is there and not there (present and absent, appeared and disappeared) at the same time. This dissertation explores the representation of disappearance in a corpus of what I consider to be key texts in Chilean literary and cultural production from the 1973 coup d‟état until recent times. I will examine texts from different literary genres – including novels, testimonios, drama, documentary film, and works that blur these distinctions – produced at different moments – including the dictatorship, the transition to democracy, the post-dictatorship, and post-Pinochet periods – in order to study the various forms of disappearance that both accompany and follow the internationally recognized crime of enforced disappearance1. What I have found is that while the secret detention and torture of dissidents is no longer practiced on a massive scale as it was during the dictatorship, other related forms of exclusion and silencing have continued since the transition to democracy. As a practice, disappearance invites us to rethink not only the dictatorship but also the persistence of disappearance, and its effects or new practices, in the present. 1 Many of the terms referring to periods of time in Chile since the dictatorship are problematic. While I will use these terms (for lack of better options), I would like to highlight some of the disputes regarding their meaning. First, the term transition to democracy is widely debated among intellectuals (which I will discuss later in the introduction). Some have used the term to represent the years that Patricio Aylwin, the first democratically elected president since the 1973 coup, was in office, 1990-1994. Others have understood the transition as an extended period, reaching 1998 when Pinochet ceased to be commander in chief of the Chilean Army and also when he was arrested in London. Still others consider the transition to democracy to be an ongoing process, due to the great number of authoritarian continuities that remain in neoliberal democratic Chile. For the purposes of this dissertation, I understand the transition to democracy to be an ongoing and incomplete process. Similarly, the term post-dictatorship has been disputed

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