A New Space for Aesthetics: Contemporary Literature And

Home , Built for the Kill, Guillermo Francella, Luis Puenzo, Street Genius

A NEW SPACE FOR AESTHETICS: CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND

FILMIC REPRESENTATIONS OF ALTERITY WITHIN THE SOUTHERN CONE

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School

of the University of Notre Dame

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

David I. Gregory Negrón

______María Rosa Olivera-Williams, Director

Ph.D. in Literature Program

Notre Dame, Indiana

December 2013

A NEW SPACE FOR AESTHETICS: CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE AND

FILMIC REPRESENTATIONS OF ALTERITY WITHIN THE SOUTHERN CONE

Abstract

David I. Gregory Negrón

The effects of the Cold War in Latin America resulted in a series of violent dictatorships that transformed Marxism into a transnational threat to erase all dissidence.

Following the model imposed by Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the Southern Cone witnessed the reshaping of its respective nations: from the political engagement of the sixties and seventies to neoliberal countries shaped by fear. The results of the military policies were thousands of murders, disappearances, and tortures, along with various economical crises. As a result, the victims of these policies started to resist the oppression of their illegitimate governments. They opposed a homogenous political program that excluded any alternative form of political discourse.

Focusing on the contemporary corpus of literature and films of the last fifteen years, this study analyze the use of aesthetics in both Chile and Argentina as an additional expression of critique to the national homogenous definitions proposed since the time of

David I. Gregory Negrón

the dictatorships. These films and novels propose a new body of/for the collective national imaginary. I suggest that they open a new space for aesthetics, a new form of interaction with the politics imposed in the public space. In Chapter One the terms, theoretical frame and historical context that guide the dissertation are introduced. Chapter

Two analyzes the contemporary literature of Chile as a response to the dictatorship and its effects, focusing on both writers that endured the regime and those who left. Chapter

Three takes these considerations in terms of film language and how we can understand the collective identity of Chile. Chapter Four focuses on Argentina and how identity is build from memory and the language that forms that memory. Chapter Five explores a varied sample of the “New Argentine Cinema” and how they build a visual language that interacts with both the national and global context. The Conclusion explores the implications of film and literature in a world used to media while opening the door for further investigations how contemporary literature and film are used in similar conditions though different national specificities, specifically in Spain.

For Jamie.

Your sisterly love and your belief in me will always guide me…

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... v

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ...... 1

1.1 Image and Politics Today ...... 1

1.2 On Focus: Terms and Definitions ...... 4

1.3 Outcast Characters, Outcast Stories ...... 9

1.4 The History Within ...... 11

1.5 Theoretical Framework ...... 13

1.6 Why This Study?...... 14

1.7 Organization of the Dissertation ...... 16

CHAPTER 2: INHERITING PINOCHET: FROM DIAMELA ELTIT TO ROBERTO

BOLAÑO ...... 25

2.1 Writing as an Alternative Voice ...... 36

2.2 Domestic vs. Public ...... 57

2.3 The Law of the Father ...... 66

2.4 Trespassing Frontiers ...... 69

CHAPTER 3: FORCED TO LOOK: A COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN FILM ...... 75

3.1 The Artist Within (The Polis) ...... 83

3.2 Art and Trauma: From the Individual to the Collective ...... 91

3.3 In & Out: A Blast from the Past as Seen from a Child’s Eyes ...... 94

iii

3.4 Uncovering the Past: Isolation and Death in Post Mortem ...... 104

3.5 Underneath the Table ...... 116

3.6 Crossing the (Killing) Line ...... 119

CHAPTER 4: THE NOSTALGIC RETURN: REPRESENTING THE PAST IN

ARGENTINE LITERATURE AS A RESPONSE TO THE PRESENT...... 130

4.1 A Sense of Identity...... 138

4.2 The Polis through the Individual...... 141

4.3 Translating/Re-writing the Past ...... 147

4.4 Horror in the Cover Page ...... 156

4.5 To Infinity and Beyond! Surpassing National Frontiers through Language...... 168

CHAPTER 5: OBSSESIVE LOOKS: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF A

COLLECTIVE TRAUMA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES ...... 174

5.1 The Artificial Eye ...... 180

5.2 Underneath the Surface: Uncovering Argentina through Garage Olimpo ...... 187

5.3 Symbolic Representation of a Trauma ...... 197

5.4 Trauma for Sale...... 203

5.5 Yesterday and Today: The Continuance of an Economic Model ...... 207

CHAPTER 6: CONCLUSION ...... 219

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 231

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would not be here, writing these words of gratitude, if it was not for “a little help from my friends.” Since I started quoting a Beatles song, let me add that “it’s been a long time” since I started this proyect. A lot of things that were not planned delayed the process, and I ended up borrowing a lot of ears, a lot of hands, and a lot of patience from a great number of people along the different stages of the process.

First of all, I want to thank my advisor María Rosa Olivera-Williams. She outdid herself not only by supervising my work, but also by being a counselor, a colleague, and a friend. She was, above all, a teacher, and it was because of her class that I decided to narrow this investigation on the Southern Cone with the intention of broadening mythe scope in my next step. The relationship between art and politics is so extensive that one needs to narrow the range at some point. María Rosa’s work inspired me to start that further south, which is atypical coming from a person born in the Caribbean and who started the Ph.D. Program working on French Postmodern Aesthetics.

I am also grateful for the help and contributions of my committee members. My thanks to Jim Collins for helping me approach a new understanding of visual language and popular culture. I also appreciate his help as chair of my committee through the previous stages of my studies in the program. At the same time I am grateful to Joseph

Buttigieg and Sam Amago. I cherish the conversations I had with both of them, as well as the counsel and open doors that Joe offered me as director of the program, as a member

of my committee, and as a colleague. I am fortunate to say the same thing about Sam, who always received me with open arms and challenging discussions during his time at

Notre Dame, and who still kept in touch during his new phase at University of North

Carolina.

I am indebted to my brothers in arms: my friends and colleagues who stood by me even when I was stressed and annoying during this long process. My endless conversations with Lupe in our office hours introduced me to new authors of novels and films that were crucial while doing my research and writing the dissertation. I would have not known where to begin if not for those hours and our parodic get togethers, especially during the long Sundays. Harry was also crucial during my first three years, preparing me with a systematic approach every time I got stuck trying to define my unorganized ideas.

And how can I forget the endless dinners at his house, or even the “peliculitas” with

Lupe? They are so many I lost count, and it became a running joke. I am also grateful for the friendship and support of Mariana and Emmanuel during the last stages of this project, when there were too many distractions threatening the completion of this work.

The same goes for Deborah, who came late in the game, but whose help was crucial to completing this project. My friends Antonio and Fabián, thanks for your words and for sharing some laughs with me from different parts of the world. I am also indebted to

Shawn Pitch for revising the draft with little time and with much on his plate.

This project, and my education, received generous contributions from José

Hernández. My studies would not have been possible without his fellowship. I also want to extend my gratitude to the Kellog Institute and the Graduate School, who supported my research in Argentina and Chile and aided me with funds for conferences and the

dissertation completion. I also thank the support of the Ph.D. in Literature program, but I especially owe my gratitude to Jessica Monokroussos for always going the extra mile and for so many emails, reminders and explanations that helped me keep my feet on the ground. I really lost count.

Finally, all my gratitude to my father, “the last one standing”. He never quite understands what I am doing, but he always keeps believing.

vii

CHAPTER 1:

INTRODUCTION

…si se trata de intervenir con conocimiento, debo decir que este conocimiento en lo que a mí me toca es mínimo. -Antonio Negri

… there exists a specific sensory experience that holds the promise of both a new world of Art and a new life for individuals and the community, namely ‘the aesthetic’. -Jaques Rancière

Art negates the categorical determinations stamped on the empirical world and yet harbors what is empirically existing in its own substance. -Theodor Adorno

Art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social is incessantly reproduced on the level of its autonomy. -Theodor Adorno

1.1 Image and Politics Today

On the night of the 17th of January 2010, a great number of Sebastián Piñera’s supporters – then the recently elected president of Chile – gathered in Alameda to celebrate his victory. Captured by an amateur camera, the images of celebration traveled

around the world.1 People were jumping while holding the Chilean flag and some banners favoring Piñera, they chanted the hymn, and they yelled different political slogans that are familiar in Chile, all in front of a building in which a red banner of Che Guevara was hanging from a window. It was a mocking and apparent confrontational response to what

Guevara’s image symbolizes in Latin America: communism. However, the chants, which started with “Here! Here! Piñera for President” (“¡Presente! ¡Presente! ¡Piñera presidente!”) quickly turned into a violent chants that are intended as insults like

“Poropopo, poropopo, anyone who doesn’t jump is a communist faggot” (“Poropopo, poropopo, el que no salte es comunista maricón”) and others along the same line. Above that, the crowd started to praise one of the most infamous dictators of Latin America in the past decade; Augusto Pinochet. From “¡Chi, chi, chi! ¡Le, le, le! ¡Viva Chile

Pinochet!” to the shocking “General Pinochet! This triumph is for you!”, (“¡General!

¡Pinochet! ¡Este triunfo es para usted!”) these chants captured the reality of modern

Chile, where a vast group of conservatives consider Pinochet as a kind of mythic hero that saved Chile from the ideals embodied in Che Guevara. The images established a link between past and present (the new elected president), capturing a division that is continuously shaping the country. The celebration symbolized that Piñera’s victory was also one for the deceased general. Above all, it was a victory against that repeating image of Che that the video kept going back to. That picture summons a reaction. It is also that image – filmed by an amateur camera and posted on Youtube – what captures a reaction that will provoke further responses.

1 The video can be seen in Youtube

The image of Che is emblematic. On the one hand the poster symbolizes the ideology of the left – the revolutionary left – in Latin America. Guevara was and still is an iconic figure that inspired the armed revolutions of the continent during the sixties and seventies. He continues to be associated with socialism, communism, and a radical rejection to capitalism in general. He also symbolizes the struggle for Latin American unity, for which he fought during his short life. Indeed, he embodied the continental unity. He was an Argentinean fighting for socialism in the Caribbean, Central and South

America, where he eventually found his death in Bolivia. On the other hand, the image in the captured video is a replica of the famous picture named “Guerrillero Heroíco”, taken by Alberto Korda. The famous image is shown, not only in banners like the one in

Alameda, but in countless T-Shirts all over the Western Hemisphere. The picture therefore resulted in a commodity that produced a fair amount of capital. Korda’s picture is then an aesthetical expression that has been transformed today into both a emblem and a commodity. These tensions are the result of the artistic expression.

Art is always political. It is political as it belongs to the public space and produces a response. Understanding the political as all activities concerning the public space or polis –in its broad definition–, art cannot escape its political nature, whether it directly represents an ideology like Guevara’s picture, or if it renounces to represent any political ideologies as in the art pour l’art’s ideal. The potential of art to either embrace or reject its political character has been used to respond and interact to political power through its place as aesthetics.

However, the role of art today and its political implications are changing in the globalized world. Means of exposition, number of audience, and financial gain are now

all part of aesthetics in numbers that were not as important before and they are as significant as the process of artistic creation itself. In that sense, the business aspect of art, and all its components, has been expanded all over the globe. As a result, art needs to interact with its politics.

1.2 On Focus: Terms and Definitions

This study examines how aesthetics, and more specifically fiction, promotes an alternative political discourse that challenges the macro narratives of the political arena.

The examination will expand beyond the national borders of Chile in an attempt to establish connections beyond national frontiers. As such, I analyze the aesthetical discourse within Chile and Argentina, taking into consideration the relationships between the two countries of the Southern Cone and their connections with Spain, the industry of the United States, and Latin America. I focus mainly on crucial works that have been published or released in the past two decades. Through fictional representations, the novels and the films in hand build an inclusive corpus on a multiplicity of voices that have been alienated or silenced by a political agenda that was shared in both countries.

As a result the works analyzed in this study reincorporate these voices through representation, challenging the macro narratives imposed by the political regimes of these two countries. These works expose the horrors and consequences of a traumatic collective experience within the role of aesthetics and fiction in contemporary society.

The violence of those years, which remain to shape the two countries, were the result of economical models created in the United States, namely what it is known as neoliberalism. In simple words, neoliberalism is a return to the laissez-faire that

anteceded the Roosevelt years and Keynesianism.2 In his introduction to Power over

People Robert W. McChesney gives a simple definition of the term:

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time- it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit. (7)

In other words, neoliberalism is the economical model that places “free-market” in a quasi-dogmatic position that reduces the government to a business facilitator and transforms democracy into an alienating spectacle. Therefore the model is both economic and political, as the former is imposed through politics to the public sphere. David

Harvey has also exhaustively explained the term:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. […] beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit. (Neoliberalism, 2)

2 Keynesianism refers to the economic theory established by John Maynard Keynes. According to his theory, the best way to end a recession and to keep a stable economy is through government intervention in the marketplace and monetary policy. According to Naomi Klein, Keynes forecasted “the end of laissez-faire” and was fundamental to the New Deal ethos and the policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (The Shock Doctrine, 54)

Government protects only a few (the wealthy and big enterprises) while the rest are merely numbers that need to consume and respond to the different markets created for them. Borrowing an iconic image of Hollywood in the nineties, under neoliberalism, transnationals are not that different from the gigantic machines in The Matrix (1996), while the rest are merely human batteries to feed the system.

However, just as the narrative plot described above, artistic expressions have been used to underline the imbalance of the model and its consequences. The Matrix is one of the biggest and most successful examples in Hollywood. While incorporating different genre elements from action to Sci-Fi, the film made a critique of our reality since the so- called Fukuyama’s “end of history”. Beyond the entertainment value, there are elements of critique that aim to describe the disconnections of consumer society while “the hero” convokes a rebellion against the so-called system. Although the invitation for rebellion is part of the entertainment value and links the first movie with the sequels, it also establishes a critique within a narrative that has a greater prospect for a bigger audience than a theoretical book on the matter.

Hollywood made other hybrid movies during the same decade. Fight Club (1999) and American Beauty (1999) are two other filmic examples of the Post-Reagan America, although not as successful in terms of box office.3 Incorporating elements of action, drama and suspense, while using some of the most prestigious names of actors at the moment, they present a “pop critique”, both of the global system, as well as the numbed post-Cold War consumer society of the nineties. I use these examples because they

3 Both films are acclaimed cult movies nowadays. However, The Matrix was a huge success, a blockbuster once compared to other Hollywood’s phenomena like the original Star Wars trilogy.

established models that have been used all over the globe in terms of film. As such, an

Argentine film like El Secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes) (2009) incorporates a hybridity of genres within its plot, from a love story all the way to a detective narrative, while, at the same time, recreating the horrors of the seventies in Buenos Aires. The same can be said about the Chilean film Machuca (2004).

The hybridity of genres have also been used in literature and there are earlier examples all over the globe. However, in the Southern Cone, writers like Roberto Bolaño in Chile and Carlos Gamerro in Argentina are examples of this combination of genres while suggesting a political and social critique within their novel’s narratives.

As a result, we can consider art, and more specifically fiction, to provide connections with reality that other aesthetical manifestations cannot provide. Jacques

Rancière explains the relationship between fiction and the people that forms the polis in philosophical terms:

‘Fiction’, as re-framed by the aesthetic regime of art, means far more than constructing of an imaginary world, and even far more than its Aristotelian sense as ‘arrangement of actions’. It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the ‘real’, or the framing of the dissensus. Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective. (Dissensus, 141)

The construction of the imaginary suggests then the possibility of a new order in terms of how the individual perceives himself and the collective, a challenge of the norm that renounces any claim of definite truth. Fiction insists on its artificiality. Nevertheless, fiction imitates what is considered to be real, which, according to the philosopher,

“always is a matter of construction, a matter of ‘fiction’ […]” (148). In terms of its role in a capitalist system that insists on its capacity of massive exposure and possible sales,

fiction has a greater capacity of attracting a bigger audience while using entertainment as part of a political response. Following that logic, while fictional literature will connect with more people than non-fictional literature, fictional film will combine this advantage of fiction with the pluratity of audiences that the medium demands.

As such, the works analyzed in this dissertation incorporates a critique of our neoliberal model while being part of it. There is a separation with the polis through critique, as well as a re-incorporation to the same economical and political model that constitutes the contemporary polis. I use this term, not in the classic definition of the word, but as an understanding of the public space in a specific community which, obviously, remained to be organized and understood as nations nowadays, even when there is a debate over transnationalism and the eradication of these frontiers.

The relationship that fiction and art in general has with the polis opens a space that I call de-negotiation. De-negotiation is the need of aesthetics to separate itself from the polis as a symbolic other, while demanding a re-incorporation to that same polis through its interaction in it. In other words, it is a desire to be art for art’s sake, while inevitably demanding a public (political) interaction in our community. The term both renounces any political role while reaffirming itself as political through aesthetics. In that sense, de-negotiation closely follows the political and aesthetical manifestation of what

Rancière defines as “dissensus”. For the philosopher, “dissensus is not a confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself” (Dissensus, 38). Thus, art manifests a demonstration of its gap, between separating from politics and other responses to it, and being part of the same model it critiques. In other words, aesthetics opposes “the system” while being part of “the

system”. Those series of tensions – of which “dissensus” takes part of– is what I call de- negotiation.

However, the tention between art and the public sphere is not new and it has been a topic of discussion by theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Umberto Eco, and Rancière.

James Collins also use Eco’s double-coding to disscuss the tention of art as a commodity and as an instrument of critique. I prosose de-negociation as the result of both the inmidiate historical context of study as well as the geographical focus analyzed in this dissertation.

1.3 Outcast Characters, Outcast Stories

De-negotiation has commonly used the figure of the artist through fiction as a symbol since the nineteen century. The artist represented and stressed the notion of the individual. He or she represented the ultimate prophet of feelings, or better yet, subjectivity. As a result, his work would be both his offering to the rest of the world and the element that would mark his difference. His “genius” would be compared with madness too, as a figure who defies the understanding of normality. As such, the representation of the artist and the madman has been mixed more than once.

However, the exclusivity of the artist as a figure made it possible to include other characters that, at some point, struggle to fit in. Post-modern art, which insisted in a plurality of voices that challenge prior claims of macro narratives made it possible to portraiy other alienated characters that, while belonging to the polis, perceive it in a different way. The exiled, the foreigner, the intellectual, the homosexual and the reader are therefore placed in the space that was reserved exclusively for both the artist and the madman before.

The subjectivities of these particular characters are used as a symbol of the role of art in a specific polis, challenging what has been understood as status quo. They, like the figure of the artist, are trans-spatial figures that, in their representational difference, offer a new understanding of the polis. In other words, these figures aim to retell the discourses inseminated in the polis through their subjectivity, a subjectivity that is obviously alien to the public space. Their presence marks a political disruption that works only as fiction and through fiction. These “alternative figures” reaffirm the presence of a minority that was often denied in these societies while offering just a possible interpretation of the potential forms they could have. The works in this dissertation focus on these marginalized voices in both Chile and Argentina.

At the same time, the novels and films analyzed use the post-modern insistence on fragmentation – from the private (character) to the public space (narrative) – in order to also appeal to a bigger audience4. On the other hand and in the particular case of these two countries, the use of fragmentation is the reflection of the heterogeneity that assembles the two nations. The oppressive forces of the different dictatorships failed to erase the polarizing factors embraced in these works of fiction, as it is seen in the streets of Buenos Aires every day, or in the people celebrating Piñera’s victory while chanting

“Communists! Suckers! State Parasites!” (“¡Comunistas! ¡Culeaos! ¡Capifes del esta’o!”), a common expression used by right-wing followers in the days of Allende.

4 A distinctive trait of post-modernism has been the use of fragmentation in the narrative. Both post-modern literature and films have used this technique to the point of familiarizing aundiences with fragmentation as a innovative narrative tool. The effectiveness of such technique is that it appeals to a larger plethora of subjectivities, therefore, increasing the chances of interest more people in the fiction at hand.

1.4 The History Within

The people chanting those slogans in Avellaneda were reaffirming a link between present and past. That past remains to feed the ideological issues that shape politics in both Chile and Argentina. There is a constant friction between those who favor the neoliberal model and those whose Guevara’s idealism remain to structure their ideologies. In fact, that friction was used as an excuse to establish what Ermilio Bernino calls “state terrorism” (“terrorismo de estado”), which manifestation ends wiping out bodies of certain political beliefs (Pinto, Películas que escuchan 10). In fact, as Catalina

Donoso Pinto argues, what connects these two countries is that they lived through traumatic dictatorships, the Chilean for its longevity and the Argentine for the magnitude of its oppressive methods (9). Both dictatorships unleashed a pattern of “state terrorism” that left thousands dead and other thousands submerged in fear. In the case of Chile, the coup led by Pinochet and the military was made against the democratic elected government of Salvador Allende, leader of the Unidad Popular (UP) coalition. As a result of Allende’s narrow electoral victory, the nation remained divided between those who favored the capitalist system and the status quo, and those who identified themselves with the new socialist government, which mostly belonged to a lower social stratum. This political imbalance was one of the triggers for the coup, and a reason why, once in power,

Pinochet could claim a return to order and a national salvation from the “political disaster” that was Allende.

Argentina’s case was even more complicated because there was not a sole government in power associated with the left (a threat to capitalist interests). The political chaos in the seventies, caused by different movements associated with the left, gave rise

to the military dictatorship. As was the case with Pinochet, Jorge Videla and the military rose to power promising national stability after the political upheaval caused by the left.

However, the political groups that opposed the capitalist system were not represented in any political party in power as the UP in Chile. Instead, the Argentine left was a fragmented opposition with a plethora of different solutions to capitalism, proposing the use of arms for most of them. The division was accentuated within these leftist groups after the third term of Juan Perón, and specifically, after the “montoneros” –a radical group from the left –, assassinated the Secretary General of the Confederation of Labor,

José Ignacio Russi. The incident justified a persecution against the movements of the left, continued by Isabel Perón once her husband died, providing for economic and political destabilization, which provoked dissatisfaction, not only from the government, but also from most of the people who were not part of these groups. As a result, these radical groups failed to gain any support, opening the opportunity for the military coup.

That polarization and trauma, which is portrayed in the novels and films analyzed in this dissertation, link the two countries of the Southern Cone; they underline the fractures of and insist on the shared horror and consequences while providing another voice to represent a plurality of voices that needed to be heard. However, in a continent where there was a direct attempt to establish neoliberalism with the help of dictatorships, three aspects unite Chile and Argentina beyond the rest of the Southern Cone. On the one hand, the immediate national borders of the two nations. On the other hand, the political tensions that they shared and that lead them to the brink of war in 1978, the result of a dispute over those same national frontiers. The films and novels under analysis not only respond to politics from that moment to the present, but also interact with global politics

like the need of exposition beyond “National Cinema”, the hybridity of genres, and the need of multinational enterprises (press houses and transnational film companies) to gain a broader audience.

1.5 Theoretical Framework

A study of the relationship of aesthetical manifestations and politics will inevitably interact with the vast philosophical works that have been developed since

Plato. However, since I focus on contemporary literature and films that exemplify what has been categorized as postmodernism by critics like Linda Hutcheon and Frederic

Jameson, my understanding of literature and film are influenced by these categorizations.

At the same time, my analysis is informed by Jacques Rancière and influenced by the understanding of Theodor Adorno’s “Aesthetics Theory.” As such, the political component raises questions also raised by Adorno, and embodies the notions of biopolitics as informed by Georgio Agamben, whose work influenced Rancière and

Michel Foucault. The latter analyzed the modern understanding of knowledge and power that defined sites of torture. At the same time, the political theoretical framework for this dissertation is informed by Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, and Naomi Klein. The former, as well as David Harvey, defined neo-liberalism and used the case of Chile as a pioneer of its negative consequences. Klein, on the other hand, details the connection between Chile and Argentina, as well as its ideological background known as the

Chicago Boys, a historical precedent that Harvey mentions as well.

1.6 Why This Study?

There is an exhaustive work on the political and economical impact of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone and its aftermath. The same can be said about how art was used, in many forms, to open spaces of resistance within the dictatorships and the so- called post-dictatorship. In fact, there have been so many articles and books about this period and its relation with art, as well as other political manifestations – testimony playing the most important role –, that there are fields of studies focusing in post- dictatorships in the Southern Cone. Another important topic of investigation concerning the political roles of aesthetics in the Southern Cone nowadays is “memory” and how to build that memory. That theme has been of great importance since the end of the Second

World War and the testimonies and writings of Primo Levi and Walter Benjamin before him. In that sense those studies of the Holocaust aftermath were and remain to inspire the study of dictatorships and post-dictatorships in the Southern Cone and Latin America.

The relevance of these discussions has been of such interest that it has disseminated within the two nations. As a result democratic governments have build “remembrance sites” (“espacios de memoria”) by the Coalition Government in Chile,5and the democratic

5 The coalition, as the name suggests, was an alliance of democratic governments, mostly from the center and left, that opposed Pinochet in the Chilean National Plebiscite in 1988. After a growing international pressure to the dictator for violations of human rights during the seventies and eighties, Pinochet agreed for a repeal plebiscite. If there was a victory for the “yes” option, he would remain in power for eight more years. If, on the other, the victory was for the “no”, the government will begin a transition to representative democracy. Under the coalition the “no” won with 55.99% of the vote and, given the international pressure, Pinochet accepted the results. However, he remained in command of the military forces until 1998. Under the coalition, the government used Argentina’s and Spain’s model of transition, which basically refused to prosecute the dictators and military for the crimes committed against their respective dictatorships.

governments in Argentina.6 Finally, “Post-trauma studies”, which are applied from the psychology field, also have been broad to the corpus of the discussion concerning the events that remain to shape these two countries.

My dissertation is informed by some of these theories and by some of the most important scholars on the subject, however, my main interest is to analyze how aesthetics behave politically in Chile and Argentina through the specificity of fiction in literature and film, specifically during the past two decades. My interest in that recent period of time responds to the attempts to recreate both present and past in what is now clearly understood as the result of those oppressive governments, namely the neoliberal model.

In that sense, I analyze the political implications of the respective narratives and how they interconnect– the written word and image – and the communities they are both representing and critiquing. My focus on fiction allows me to center the analysis on how they are built to connect with the reader or the audience while projecting themes that demand new forms of manifestation in the polis. In other words, the use of fiction allows me to examine its interaction and power in the contemporary polis in terms of de- negotiation. Finally, this is the first of three envisioned parts. As such, the transnational analysis between these two countries is cementing a broader analysis on how these two artistic media are interacting within the polis in the political environment that we have today. As a result, I close my arguments linking these works and political contexts with

Spain. The connection will prove fundamental for a second work about how narrative and

6 The government of both Nestor Kirchner and Cristina are among the most active governments in finding the torture camps and turning them into museums or “memory sites”. There are a vast number of them that remain to be building at this moment in Buenos Aires and the rest of Argentina.

film are behaving in Spain in terms of their own dictatorship and their bridging positioning in relation to Chile and Argentina.

Hence, the three components of my theoretical framework are being considered on how contemporary literature and film interact with the local political context on the one hand, how they are translated into fictional art on the other hand, and finally, how do they respond to transnational politics.

1.7 Organization of the Dissertation

In terms of local politics and as I have mentioned earlier, the Southern Cone was the laboratory to test the neoliberal agenda. Augusto Pinochet embraced the theories of the Chicago Boys and imposed them through the use of force to suppress any opposition from the people. Chapter Two, “Inheriting Pinochet: from Diamela Eltit to Roberto

Bolaño”, opens a representation of the collective paranoia that shaped the dictatorship. Its violence remains to mark a community that excludes anybody who does not conform to the status quo. There is an inherited punishment imposed to those who question the paternal figure, which, to this day, continues to be Pinochet.7 However, even when

Pinochet still represents the organizing figure on a symbolic level, the transition to democracy meant its transformation to the logic of the market. The market, which takes the place of the Father while renouncing on any constriction of its power, excludes whoever does not conform to the order imposed by it, alienating any form of dissidence.

As a result, I explore power and the marginalized in Los vigilantes (The Vigilants) and in

7 To this day, Pinochet remains to be called “el tata” (Grandpa’) by those who call him like that to mock the term and those cherishing the dictator.

Mano de Obra (Work Force), both written by Diamela Eltit. I also examine Jamás el fuego nunca (Never the Fire Again) to a minor extent, also from Eltit.

The same exclusion of voices links Elit’s work with Luis Sepúlveda. While Eltit remained in Chile during the dictatorship and even belonged to CADA (Colectivo de acciones de arte), Sepúlveda was forced to exile. In that sense, Sepúlveda’s critical position is that of an exiled. The stories in Historias marginales (Margined Stories) provide an echo of himself and the testimonies he met along the way. As such they provide an alternative figure within fiction, immediately claiming its representation with its very own title.

The second part of Chapter 2 focuses on two aspects. On the first hand, I analyze the tensions within the narrative between the public space and the private space while, at the same time, examine the specific or local context versus the general or “universal” context. In other words, how the dehumanizing logic of the free-market erases the borders that divide those spaces while, at the same time, erasing the divisions between national and transnational. The latter is exemplified in Roberto Bolaño’s work in general and, more specifically, in Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives)8.The novel is immersed in a global context that crosses the specificities of Chile and Latin America.

Blending the literary complexity of the novel and elements of pop-narrative, Los detectives salvajes underlines the complexity of a political context which is now a global reality for the writer, mainly the editorial need to sell books.9

8 See the translation by Natasha Wimmer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

9 The phenomenon of the literary business is more linked to the writers of the Anglo-speaking world than with Spanish speaking writers or even other languages. A fiction writer within the former

Chapter Three, “Forced to Look: Picturing a Collective Identity”, dwells in the same problematic but from the perspective of Chilean film. Following the same pattern of analysis that starts from the specific or a micro-narrative perspective, the chapter begins with Y las vacas vuelan (Cows Also Fly, 2004). The independent film, directed by

Fernando Lavanderos, portrays Chilean society from the view of a foreigner. At the same time, the film questions and defies the definitions of what is supposed to be a fiction film and what it is supposed to be a documentary. The analysis opens the window to consider the role of fiction in the contemporary polis. At the same time, the film questions the role of art and artist in Chile, which, at the same time, builds a link to Pablo Larraín’s first film, Fuga (Fugue, 2006).

There is a relationship between violence and art in Fuga. While Lavandero’s film tries to incorporate art as part of the polis, Larraín’s “excludes it” within the plot of his film. As a result, the artist is expelled from society and for the sake of it. The representation of music as art and the need to silence it link Fuga with the political context of Pinochet’s regime. In fact, the director next three films are part of a trilogy that dwells with the coup, the dictatorship and the return to democracy that lead to the coalition government. Tony Manero (2008) and Post-mortem (2010), the first two films of the trilogy, make a direct political response that can be compared with Eltit’s work in literature. They also make a darker representation than a previous attempt to represent the context has the same pressures nowadays as an actor, director, singer, etc. He needs an agent who will look to sell his books, try to negotiate movie adaptations, and so on. At the same time, he needs to sell well in order to get economic support for his books. Within the Latin American and Spanish contexts, the writer has historically been tied to the Academy or the newspaper business. However, this has started to change in recent years, especially in Spain, where they are imitating the system used in the Anglo-speaking world. Roberto Bolaño is one of the few authors who have overcome the pressures to a Latin American writer for either be a member of the Academy or a reporter. However, he did not have the chance to fully enjoy the broad scope of his success before his death in 2003.

past within fictional film, Andrés Wood’s Machuca (2004). The latter, which I also study, is a story that attempts to raise questions about the political awareness that a

“coming of age story”, such as the film itself, can create.10

Both Wood and Larraín depart from the (commonly used) documentary genre in order to achieve a greater audience. As a result, the three films make a revision of history through the micro-perspective of fictional characters and how they perceive the violence of the days preceding the coup as well as those of the dictatorship. In that sense, these films represent the political context of the past to understand the collective identity of

Chile today.

I finally analyze in this chapter the connection between Chile, Argentina, and

Hollywood through Mi mejor enemigo (My Best Enemy, 2005), directed by Alex Bowen, and Tony Manero. Bowen’s film places its narrative in the Beagle Conflict, which almost lead both countries to war. While doing so, it questions the difference between the two nations and, above all, it questions the notion of the national frontier itself. Tony Manero, on the other hand, presents the opportunity to see the interaction between Chilean film and their national cinema versus the spectacle of Hollywood and their global relevance.

This analysis circles around the relationship between local versus “universal” or global once again, raising questions about audience, not only in terms of the local industry in relationship with Hollywood, but of the latter’s influence on the local sphere. I also bring

10 Stinne Krog Poulsen defines the film as a childhood film. According to her, a childhood film (and she defines Machuca as one) differentiates itself from a children film because of the content. While the former identifies itself as being a target group kind of movie, childhood films are films “that evolves around the concept of memory” (History, Memory and Nostalgia 2), always relating to a nostalgic past while evolving through the eyes of a main character child or teenager. Therefore, because it is also a relationship with the struggles of growing up, the film also connects with a younger audience and not just to adults who grew up during that historic period of time.

into discussion how many people are really watching their national cinema and how these films are exhibited beyond national borders.11 In that sense I analyze the relationship between film and politics, not only in terms of narrative, but also in terms of audience and market for these movies.

My study moves on to how these issues are presented in Argentina and its recent literature in Chapter Four, “The Nostalgic Return: Representing the Past in Argentine

Literature as a Response to the Present”. According to Luis Martín-Estudillo and Roberto

Apuero, the case in Argentina varies from Chile (Post-authoritarian Culture). Contrary to Chile, Argentina’s recent economic crash opened a door for social disintegration. As a result, the case of Argentina was not about a nation that succeeded somehow on the imposed economic system according to political propaganda. On the contrary, the harmful results – both politically and economically – became so clear, that there has been an active participation within the Argentinean polis since the end of the dictatorship. As such, the collective identity is defined by political activism on the one hand, and by constant fragmentation on the other. I focus my analysis on this identity focusing on three medullar writers: Sylvia Molloy, Martín Kohan, and Carlos Gamerro.

While focusing on language, El común olvido (A Common Oversight) also insists on the notion of identity and how the artificial construction of memory “translates” into an understanding of both placement and displacement for the individual and for the

11 According to Andrew Higson, national cinema is usually exhibited in international film festivals, providing already a transnational characteristic of what is considered national cinema. This raises questions about the political consequences and/or intention of the producers. Are these films trying to create awareness so that the political leadership cannot repeat the same oppressive situations? If so, what happens when the film is exhibited in Europe or around the world? These changes within the political interaction of the film in different communities are taken into consideration throughout the dissertation.

people that form the polis. The representation of the past in the novel links El común olvido with both Kohan and Gamerro’s novels. Kohan’s novels Dos veces junio (Two

Times June) and Ciencias morales (School for Patriots) place their respective narratives during the dictatorship, revising the roles of different sectors in society and exposing the paranoia of the junta at its best. Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara (A yuppie in the Che Guevara’s Column), on the other hand – a continuation to Gamberro’s previous novel – recreates those days while parodying the radical movements of the left and their eventual dissolution. The novel depicts the domestication of the revolutionary left and their eventual incorporation in the democratic government as a commodity, not that different from that Guevara’s image in Avellaneda. Through that novel I analyze the complexities and tensions of literature in a transnational context. In other words, I examine how literature responds to the neoliberal model and how through new de- negotiation spaces the novel interacts with a broader political context. Guevara is, once again, the perfect image for both the left and capitalism, which stresses the interconnectivity of Argentinean recent literature with Chile, Latin America, and even

Cuba.

Chapter Five, “Obsessive Looks: Cinematic Representations of a Collective

Trauma and its Consequences”, explores the relationship of what is called the “New

Argentine Cinema” (“el nuevo cine argentine”) with politics and how they also respond to both the local and the global. Campanella’s El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their

Eyes, 2009), which won a series of international awards – including best foreign picture in the Academy Awards –, opens the opportunity of examining how a recent film responds to its local context (Argentina’s past and present) while projecting universal

themes that appeals to a global audience. El secreto de sus ojos questions within its narrative the ethical values of justice and how to achieve them in a polis where violence was institutionalized through the government.

Hence the film insists on dealing with a violent past through fiction and film, which links it to other national cinema projects that portrayed the resulting horrors of that excess of power. Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo (1999) is a portrayal of the clandestine camps and of torture itself. The film showcases the last consequences of modern mentality and they obsession with discipline and punishment, as described by Foucault.

Gaze and control are linked and used to impose fear during the dictatorship in Argentina.

According to Naomi Klein, “[…] the junta’s killings went underground but they were always present. Disappearances, officially denied, were very public spectacles enlisting the silent complicity of entire neighborhoods”(90). As such, the terror produced by the public display neutralized any kind of resistance. The desired result was that any individual within the polis felt constantly watched, which is precisely what is visually at stake in Lerman’s La mirada invisible (The Invisible Eye, 2010), the adaptation of

Kohan’s Ciencias Morales.

However, the exclusion of those perceived as “threat” was not reserved by the military junta; they remain today for those who are not protected by political parties or those who question the neoliberal system. These exclusions, which are inherited from the dictatorship, motivates the narratives of Nicolás Capelli’s Matar a Videla (Kill Videla,

2010), and Aristarain’s Lugares Comunes (Common Ground, 2002). While the former is an independent film that links today’s consumerist society with the figure of Jorge Videla

(much as the Father is tied with Pinochet in Eltit’s Los vigilantes), Lugares Comunes is a

film about the role of the intellectual and his disfunctionality in neoliberal society. The movie, however, presents a narrative that mixes politics with image and literature, represented in Alejandra Pizarnik’s poetry. In fact, Pizarnik’s poetry represents a (poet) figure who transcends Argentina and who is famous for using universal themes. In that sense I use these topics to close the chapter with a cyclic return to El secreto de sus ojos and the implications of “selling the image”.

Finally, I conclude with the transnational implications that these two artistic expressions denote in these two countries. Specifically, I close the dissertation analyzing

Spain’s involvement and dialogue with the Southern Cone. In that vein, I briefly set up the analysis of Luisgé Martín’s Las manos cortadas (The Sliced Hands). In that novel, the whole myth of Allende is revised and questioned from the discovery of certain letters that reveals the president’s intention to have an armed occupation with Castro’s help. This novel opens the door to the reasons of revisiting Allende’s myth via Spain, the Spanish involvement with the attempt to prosecute Pinochet, and its economic involvement within a neoliberal agenda that shapes the Southern Cone, as it is represented in Un lugar en el mundo (A Place in the World) (1992). I also set up the obvious links of the Southern

Cone and Spain’s own delayed self-reflections on its own dictatorship. Novels like Mala gente que camina (Walking Evil People), Los girasoles ciegos (Blind Sunflowers), and films like the latter’s adaptation (2008), Butterfly (1999), or films such as Libertarias

(Freedom Fighters, 1996) and Vacas (Cows, 1992), underline the need of revising the official versions of history proclaimed within Franco’s dictatorship. They are an example of Spain’s use of fiction to reinsert voices that were silenced through the regime, attesting the need to further explore the parallel movement within art that is happening in Spain,

Chile and Argentina. The relationship between these nations underlines the connection between the triad of countries through art. At the same time, the case of Spain opens the space to extend my analysis of aesthetics and politics beyond national frontiers and how both literature and fiction de-negotiate as a response and reflection of neoliberal politics whose tensions define our society today beyond any specific nationality.

CHAPTER 2:

INHERITING PINOCHET: FROM DIAMELA ELTIT TO ROBERTO BOLAÑO

…sigo pensando lo literario más bien como una disyuntiva que como una zona de respuestas que dejen felices y contentos a los lectores. –Diamela Eltit

Contrasted with most of the fictional films produced in Chile during the democratic government, Chilean literature is enriched with a number of authors who write in response to the political structure established by the dictatorship of Augusto

Pinochet.12 Diamela Eltit and Luis Sepúlveda, while having different styles, topics and

12 Even when Isabel Allende, the most popular Chilean writer and one of the most popular writers in Latin America, is not writing about politics anymore, her first successful novel (The House of Spirits) represented a metaphor of the political situation of Pinochet’s regime. Her latest works focus on other topics like family and autobiographical fictions. However, this is also a reflection of the political panorama of Chile nowadays, where many people do not want to discuss the political situation or rather talk about other notions like progress, instead of focusing on a critique of the new established order. Allende’s most recent novels follow a formula that imitates the pop-writers of the “Global” world. This does not imply that her work is not valid or that is not political, but that her focus is different from the main writers that we will be analyzing, with some links with Bolaño’s work. Other Chilean writers like Ariel Dorfman and Pedro Lemebel are also examples of the politically charged literature of this nation of the Southern Cone. Death and the Maiden is the most famous play of the former, and was premiered in Chile right after the end of Pinochet’s government, which mostly caused bad critiques following the premise that it was not a good time to represent the horrors of the regime, which ironically, is the topic that moves the drama in that play. Lemebel, on his part, has focused on a queer writing that is unique in Chile and Latin-America. However, because homosexuals and queer were also attacked by a regime that promoted conservative and false concepts of religion and patriarchy, his characters are victims of Pinochet’s Chile in some of his novels like Tengo miedo torero. More recent writers like Rafael Gumucio and Alejandra Costamagna also build their novels around the political construction of Chile, but the critique is developed as a sub-plot of the main

approaches, are some of the most prominent prose writers from a generation that witnessed the coup and experienced the dictatorship. Roberto Bolaño, on the other hand, was also a witness of that violent time in Chile’s history, but started writing prose at the end of the dictatorship and long after he was exiled from Chile, like so many other writers and artists, including Sepúlveda. However, Bolaño never returned to his homeland and spent his last days in Spain, contrasting with other exiled writers.13 I will mainly focus my analysis in this chapter on these three writers: Diamela Eltit as a figure that survived the dictatorship and fought it in Chile, Luis Sepúlveda as an exiled writer that was always committed to Marxist ideas and returned to Chile after the dictatorship, and Roberto Bolaño, who started writing fiction in the nineties while living in Spain.

Each of these writers worked and, with exception of the latter, used their fiction to establish an open critique to the political system operating within the national polis of

Chile.

Diamela Eltit is one of the most predominant figures of Chilean art and literature since the dictatorship was still in power. She was one of the founders of the group called the Colective of Acts of Art or CADA (Colectivo de acciones de arte), a group where, along with poets like Raúl Zurita, visual artists Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo, and

narrative, in other words, the narrative is not about the post-dictatorship or the political history if Chile. See Memorias Prematuras, Comedia Nupcial, and Cansado ya del sol.

13 Ariel Dorfman is another prominent writer and dramaturge who also needed to exile after the coup against Salvador Allende. However, he has always been involved with Chile in his actions and writings and, even when he became a citizen of the United States in 2004, he spend half of his time coming back to Chile since the dictatorship ended. At the same time and contrary to Bolaño, Dorfman never stopped writing and intervening in things concerning Chile during and after the dictatorship.

sociologist Fernado Balcells, proposed an intervention of art in the “everyday life”.14 This experience marked Eltit’s work, both the novels she wrote when Pinochet was in power, as well as the novels she published in post-dictatorship.15 Los vigilantes (The Vigilants),

Mano de obra (Work Force), and Jamás el fuego nunca (Never the Fire Again),16 are all novels written after the end of the regime. However, these three novels share characteristics that appeared in her first novel Lumpérica (1983). The presence of the corporeal body, public life (which in the first novel was the public square), and the fragmented writing, are elements inherited from the first novel that I will explore as part of how the narrative fiction works as a political instrument.

Los vigilantes, published in 1994, just four years after Chile returned to democracy, focuses on the story of a nameless mother and her child, who live under an

14 The movement was a continuation of the Escena avanzada (Advanced Scene), which consisted on two artistic ideologies. The first one, an avant-guarde approach a little detached of the political atmosphere of the time. The other group followed a neo-marxist political ideology and is considered to be an influence for the victory of Socialist President Salvador Allende. The movement was censored after the coup against Allende, but CADA, founded in 1979, continued on that line of using conceptual art to provoke reactions within the polis by challenging the practices and definitions provided by the regime. Beyond that, and according to Raúl Zurita, their desire was to insist in the meanings that were part of the nation before the coup. Their art meant to recover the definitions that the government was trying to change with the use of force, definitions like Chile as a nation, freedom, family, social justice and so on. At the same time, these manifestations followed the necessity of giving some continuance to the political discourses of the nation when it was ruled by a republic democratic form of government, specially, by those projects that the Socialist government of Allende was trying to implement like the distribution of milk among children of families with low income. CADA was also responsible of a happening campaign called “NO +”, where artist were convoked to write the slogan on different walls and places all over the country. The reaction of the people was to fill in the blank after the no “more” (meaning of the + symbol in Spanish) with different things they repudiated from the dictatorship, including the regime itself. At the end, the slogan was appropriated by the coalition that campaigned against the dictatorship of Pinochet in the plebiscite of 1988, where the two options given to the people were “Yes”, to accept eight more years of the regime, or “No”, to end it and return to a democratic form of government.

15 In an interview to Chilean poet Héctor Montecinos, he calls the actual state of post-dictatorship the “hyper-dictatorship”, where the same logins of control and order apply to the people, but the oppression is invisible and disguised under a fascination with consumerism. Personal interview March 25, 2011.

16 The translation of the respective titles are mine.

oppressive system that threatens their very existence. At the beginning of the novel, which is divided in three parts, the son is the lowest character under the power strata depicted within the narrative. In fact, the first part of the novel is narrated by the child and follows his “stream of consciousness”. His fragmented and incomplete thoughts circle the figure of his mother. The mother and her actions are only partially described.

The child underscores the act of writing: “Mamá escribe. Mamá es la única que escribe”

(Eltit, Tres novelas, 35) (“Mom writes. Mom is the only one that writes”). The action of writing precedes everything else in the novel, placing the son to a passive role even during that first part of the novel. The voice of the son is, therefore, not only powerless, but limited and out of place. In fact, during his interventions he describes himself over and over as a dumb person (“tonto”). This is mainly the reason why, during the first act of the novel, the son’s voice is a reactionary voice that is always in response, not only of the paper, the written world and her mother, but also of his bodily desires which haunt him along with his laughs and plays.

The under-role within the power structure of the novel is followed by the mother, who is the main voice of the second part. That voice is revealed only within the written world, as was previously described by the son and underlined at the end of the first act:

“Ahora mamá escribe. Me vuelve la espalda. La espalda. Escribe: […]” (43). (“Mom writes now. She turns her back on me. Her back. She Writes: […]”) As a result, the second part of the novel consists of the voice of his mother as represented by her letters.

The plot developed in this second section complicates the power structure established in the first part, as the reader discovers that not only the paper and the written world surpasses her power, but the father of the son, which she believes is the one to whom she

is addressing her letters, is also above her. The second part of the novel is therefore based on all her letters to him and, as it happens with the son under his limited perception of things, her voice is also reactionary. It is always responding to an invisible presence and

– as all the characters in the novel – to the nameless father.

The invisible father is in fact the powerful figure all along the narrative. The father questions every decision of the mother and controls her behavior . He is always watching her every move, accusing her, threatening her to submit to an invisible law. The father’s power structure is multiplied by the interference of his own mother. It is that character, the mother-in-law of the mother, who is in charge of exercising the invisible law. Therefore, she is the one who starts visiting the family (mother-son) and inquiring her about their behavior.

The father’s grasp of power extends also to the multiple neighbors, who follow and watch every move the mother makes. The father’s net of power, based above all in a panoptical voice that sees and questions the private world of the mother-son’s house, ends up eroding the mother and the house, and evicting her of that house, in other words, expelling her from the private space.

The destruction of the house leads to the third act. The reader is forced to return then to the “stream of consciousness” of the son. However, after the father’s exhibition of power, there is no home, therefore there is no mother. In other words, once the son and the mother are on the streets with nothing, like vagabonds, the mother seems to sink even lower than the son within the power structure of the novel. Even though the son continues with his rambling and self-accusations of being dumb, he sees her mother as a victim of the father and of her foolishness to respond to his logic and demands.

The power structure developed in Los vigilantes establishes a parallel between the political system of the dictatorship and the political system after dictatorship. As a result the novel can be analyzed under the terms of a dictatorship regime and, at the same time, under the new “democracy”, which by the time of the novel’s publishing in 1994, was starting to be formed in the process of transition. In that sense, the oppression did not end after Pinochet, especially when the politics that were violently imposed by his regime continued without much resistance under the new democratic governments.

The new order under democracy is depicted in both Jamás el fuego nunca and

Mano de obra. On the first novel, Eltit focuses on the leftist political discourse that survived during the transition. This is significant because in post-dictatorial Chile, there has been support by the new democratic governments of the neoliberal system promoted and imposed by dictatorship. There is not a strong and coherent opposition within the political sphere, contrasting with Chilean and Eltit’s literature, therefore the novel describes two moribund characters and ex-members of the leftist movements of the seventies in South America, who live in infrahuman conditions and in an eroded house.

The eroded house establishes a link with Los vigilantes, where there is a crisis within the household that holds a parallel to the world outside. Inside that lifeless place, which seems to have fallen from time and place considerations, the two characters who were once active in defending their political movements, are now deformed, old, useless, and tired. Not only do they echo the old-worn-out discourses of the Left (which are still held by a minority in Chile), but they also represent distrust on any counter political argument in the new post-dictatorship society, both from the Left as well as from the Right. The inaction of the characters situates them in a non-space where the faith in action is “at

rest” or dying, as they move through the images recreated by the prose. The possibility of a long gone political ideal is lost.

Mano de obra also shares that scenario of despair. There is no escape from the logic of the market in the novel. If in Los vigilantes every social member was a possible vigilant and/or informer, in Mano de obra they are regulated by the invisible hand of the market, which shapes all of their lives. The supermarket or the megastore is the place to meet with friends, to see and interact with other social classes, to complaint, to spend time and, above all, to consume. Within that space – which takes over the neighborhood – everybody is equal, divided only by their capacity to buy merchandise, but sharing the same type of light which, at the beginning of the novel, is matched with the light of God in a crib stand in occasion for the Holidays. As such, the new religion is consumerism and the megastore its new church, the place of new revelations and, assuming the position of God in Christianity, it is all powerful and knows it all/sees it all (from the camera and security guards looking at the monitors, to the constant supervision of the managers).

However, the second part of the novel, which is called Puro Chile, presents seven characters with proper names (Enrique, Alberto, Gabriel, Gloria, Isabel, Sonia and

Pedro), contrasting with the other novels of Eltit. These seven characters (with the exception of Gloria) are workers in the supermarket who complain about the clients and the supervisors, as it was the case with the anonymous characters of the first part. They also share a house that they can only afford with the combination of their respective salaries, salaries that are always threatened by the invisible hand of the market. As a result, they are always distrusting each other, they are always threatened to be fired and replaced by a long line of unemployed people waiting for a chance outside, and they are

also pressured to be reduced to countless humiliations by the supervisors who, trying to save money for the company, prefer new employees rather than old ones who can ask for more benefits or that are less happy with the working atmosphere. The anger of these characters with the work environment lead them to reflect their frustrations among each other, mimicking the situation of the market in their own home and accelerating the erosion, both of the private space as well as of the characters themselves. Their unstable situation finds its resolution in the last chapter when Enrique, the former leader of the group, betrays them for a better position in the store (that of a supervisor), and fire them all. Once the rest of the characters are on the streets, Gabriel, who was the youngest of the group, changes, and assumes the role of the new leader:

Porque Gabriel siempre nos había querido y era (ahora lo notábamos gracias a la luz natural) un poquito más blanco que nosotros. Ah, sí, él tenía el porte y tenía la presencia que necesitábamos para la próxima forma de organización que, sabíamos, nos iba a indicar una ruta posible. Por eso, por el cariño y el respeto que nos inspiraba, asentimos cuando nos dijo: “vamos a cagar a los maricones que nos miran como si nosotros no fuéramos chilenos. Sí, como si no fuéramos chilenos igual que todos los demás culpados chuchas de su madre. Ya pues huevones, caminen. Caminemos. Demos vuelta la página”. (360)

[Gabriel always loves us and he was (we now noticed thanks to the natural light) a little whiter than us. Oh yes, he had the presence and appearance that we needed for the reorganization we needed to learn a new path to take. The love and respect that he inspired led us to agree with him when he said: “let’s fuck the mother-fuckers that look at us as if we weren’t Chileans. Yeah, as if we weren’t as Chileans as all of them mother fuckers. So let’s go. Let’s do this. Let us turn the page over.]

His last words propose a new form of life, but without anticipating which one will it be.

In other words, Gabriel’s last speech does not provide a certain future for them, especially when that future is tied with the racial prejudices that are so common in Latin

America.

These novels of Eltit focus their attention on the people that are been marginalized in the new political order of Chile, established since the dictatorship. A similar interest moves Luis Sepúlveda’s writing. Historias Marginales, a book of short stories, tells the tales that no one would tell; in other words, and as the name of the book suggests, it tells the stories of the people who do not count within the polis and under the logic of neoliberalism. That is the reason why the introduction, which also works as the first short story of the book, is called by the same name. That is also the reason why the main topic of that story/introduction is about telling stories that resist to be forgotten because, as the voice of the narrator explains with a quote of poet Guimaräes Rosa, “to narrate is to resist” (“narrar es resistir”). In that sense, the narrator finds a written phrase that moves him to tell these stories:

En un extremo del campo […] alguien, ¿quién? grabó, tal vez con la ayuda de un cuchillo o de un clavo, el más dramático de los reclamos: “Yo estuve aquí y nadie contará mi historia.” […] Supongo que he leído unos mil libros, pero jamás un texto me pareció tan duro, enigmático, bello y al mismo tiempo lacerante como aquel escrito sobre la superficie de una piedra [...] Ignoro cuánto tiempo permanecí frente a esa piedra, pero a medida que la tarde caía vi otras manos repasando la inscripción para evitar que la cubriera el polvo del olvido […] Todos ellos y muchos más estaban allí, repasando las palabras grabadas sobre una piedra, y yo supe que tenía que contar sus historias. (Sepúlveda, Historias 8-9)

[In a corner of the field […] someone, who? Carved, perhaps with the help of a knife or a nail, the most dramatic of all claims: “I was here and no one will tell my story.” […] I suppose to have read thousand of books, and I’ve never found such strong, enigmatic, beautiful and excruciating words as those written on the surface of a rock […] I don’t know how much time I remained facing that rock, but as the evening fell upon me, I saw many other hands revising the inscription just to keep it from getting covered by the dust of oblivion. […] They were there, all of them, revising the carved words on the stone. I knew then that I needed to tell their stories.]

As a result of that inscription, all the short stories that follow the introduction/story of

Historias Marginales are fragmented parts of a book that presents itself as a whole, as if

it were a novel. They also provide an alternative figure within fiction that claims its representation, beginning with the very own title of the book.

Contrasting with Los vigilantes and Jamás el fuego nunca, Sepúlveda makes sure to name his characters, to make sure “they are not forgotten”, that they are rescued from their hidden places and reestablished in the collective imaginary. The stories do not present abstract characters; they are the stories of the Duarte twins, Vidal, Professor

Gálvez, and Juanpa. The first characters are the trapeze artists of a circus who are separated by the Argentinean government because one of them is supposed to be a

“terrorist” from Argentina, even though both twins were born in Uruguay. Vidal is a syndical leader persecuted by the law in Ecuador who never stops fighting for his fellow workers’ rights without any regard for fame or recognition. Professor Gálvez was a school teacher of a small town in the south of Chile who lost his son as a result of the dictatorship and was later exiled to Hamburg, where he died fighting for the exiles who presented their cases to him, especially the Chilean exiles in that part of the world.

Juanpa was an editor of a newspaper that dared to resist Pinochet’s censorship and propaganda, an accomplishment that cost him to be the dictator’s private prisoner for six years, act that never stopped him from keeping on writing.

Historias marginales (Margined Stories) is also the book of “lost causes” or ideals that run the risk to be forgotten under the logics of neoliberalism. As a result, many of the stories in the book focus on the threat to the forests in Ecuador, the cut of trees in the Chile-Argentina Patagonia, or the natural way of life in the forest, situations that complete Sepúlveda’s critique of a political order that is accepted by the majority of the people who are part of the polis, all in the name of “progress.”

Roberto Bolaño shares these concerns and writes about them in Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives). The novel recreates a fictional past from the present. In that sense, most of the novel’s plot occurs in the Mexico of the 1970s, specifically between 1975 and 1976. That is the year when the first narrator, Juan García Madero, joins a group of avant-garde poets called The Real Visceralists (“los real visceralistas”), founded by Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano (an alter ego of Bolaño in his youth). García

Madero tells his story over a detailed recount of events that he writes on his diary at the end of 1975. In that year, not only does he join the group and embraces their aesthetical beliefs, but he is submerged in the bohemian life of Mexico at the end of the seventies.

That plot translates then into a “coming of age” story that involves the character in his first attempts at poetry (he was first enrolled to study Law), his role as an underground artist, the lost of his virginity along with other sexual relationships, and his friendship with the founders of the movement.

However, in the second and most extensive part of the novel – which is named after the book – García Madero loses his role as narrator. In fact, he disappears during most of the testimonies that filled these pages in the novel, as a series of characters share the narrator’s voice; These characters present their testimonies and stories that could just as well be separated into short stories apart from García Madero’s intervention. All of these testimonies circle around the mystique of Ulises Lima and Alberto Belano, making it clear that these two are the main characters of the novel. As a result, most of the testimonies taking part of Los detectives salvajes are either of how they met one of the two characters, or about a moment in their lives all over the world between 1976 and

1996.

The third and final part of the novel returns to García Madero and the last pages of his diary in 1976. However, these pages, rather than positioning him as a leading character once again, underline a resonant theme during the second part of the novel (and therefore most of the novel): the failure of Lima and Belano’s pretentions and, even more, of the poetic movement of the “Real Visceralists”. According to Roberto Brodsky, this third act is more about what was lost in the youth and, therefore, about death:

Juventud, pasión y muerte forman la trinidad de la literatura latinoamericana, y si en el principio hubo un joven poeta que anotaba cuanto veía y sentía, al final su diario será un espacio desolado y lúgubre, recuento de una búsqueda que se torna en persecución y, finalmente, en interrogante criptografía. Es el tercer momento de la novela y […] el crimen y la poesía se descubren como términos equivalentes. (Roberto Bolaño, 88-9.)

[Youth, passion, and death, shape the trinity of Latin American literature. If there was a young poet that wrote everything he saw and felt at the beginning of the novel, there will be a dark and desolate diary at the end, a record of a search that turns into a pursuit and eventual cryptography. It is the third act of the novel and […] crime and poetry become equal terms.]

That sense of no-purpose that closes the novel questions the bohemian life of those years and even mocks the ideals and practices of those kinds of movements and/or circles. At the same time, it questions the role of art during those years up until today, and its interaction with a political world that surpasses the limitations of the national imaginary.

2.1 Writing as an Alternative Voice

…las piedras y las hierbas tienen virtudes, pero mucho más las palabras. -Roberto Bolaño

The role of the written word is a constant concern in Los vigilantes, which serves as an analogy of the role of the writer as an artist. In that novel, and as I have mentioned

earlier, words are what open the door to the tragic relationship of the son-mother-father trilogy and what continues to move the plot forward until its resolution. Even when the first part is built on a series of fragmented sentences that pretend to represent the

“thoughts” of the son, the latter confirms that his existence is thanks to the writing exercise when he affirms that he exists only in a group of papers; “I only exist in a bunch of papers.” (Tres novelas, 37) (“Existo solo en un conjunto de papeles”) In that sense, the writer works as a creator of worlds, from the son whose existence is based on the written paper, to the situation they live in and the inquiries of the father. In fact, it is important for the narrative that we never get to read any letter from that character. The reader has to imply or imagine the demands of the latter according to the responses of the mother- writer.

On the other hand, the mother never expresses any thought beyond what she writes in the paper. In other words, the world depicted in Los vigilantes can only be manifested by language, more specifically by the written word, which means that her relationship with the world is mediated by language. At the same time, the language used by the mother-writer represents alternate echoes of the political context which Eltit herself is referring to as a writer. In fact, besides her family situation, her big concern is how the society is imitating the West as a mirage, an unfulfilled promise that does not belong to her and their realities:

The neighbors claim that it is crucial to watch over the destiny of the West. Tell me; haven’t you thought that Western Civilization may be going in an opposite direction?

(81)

([Los vecinos proclaman que es indispensable custodiar el destino de Occidente. Dime

¿acaso no has pensado que Occidente podría estar en la dirección opuesta?)] (81). This relationship with the West has been a fascination all over Latin America since the founding of national states. According to Eduardo Galeano, people in Latin America keep acting as if they only were the “sons” of Europe and nobody else. (Ser como ellos, 32) It is the illusion of the West and a desire to be like it – to be noticed by that imaginary – which also shapes and builds the logics shaping the neighborhood that the mother questions:

[…] los vecinos más poderosos ahora trepan hacia los confines, cerca de las planicies cordilleranas, para sortear la pesadumbre de la crisis. Sin embargo, lo que ellos en realidad encubren, es que no quieren pertenecer a un territorio devaluado y que están dispuestos a iniciar cualquier medida para salvarse de una terrible humillación. Por eso van de casa en casa transmitiendo leyes que carecen de sentido. Nuevas leyes que buscan provocar la mirada amorosa del otro lado de Occidente. Pero el otro lado de Occidente es terriblemente indiferente a cualquier seducción y sólo parece ver a la ciudad como una gastada obra teatral. (62)

[[…] the most powerful neighbors are now going to the borderlines, near the mountain plains, to raffle out the burden of the crisis. However, what they are really hiding is that they don’t want to belong to a devaluated territory and that they are willing to do anything to save themselves from a terrible humiliation. That’s the reason why they go proclaiming senseless laws from house to house. They are new laws aimed to attract the love and attention of the other side of the West. But the other side of the West is terribly indifferent to any attempt of seduction and they only seem to see the city as a wasted stage play.]

The questioning of the West as a model to the neighbors parallels the obsession of Chile and Latin America to assume the discourses of “progress”, “modernity” and the capitalist models of the West to be or feel part of the First World17. In fact, this questioning of the

17 This “imitation” of the West was translated into an imitation of the East during the Cold War. In fact, most of the political parties and movements from the Left, especially the different Communist parties

Western model establishes a link with “Un tal Lucas” (“A certain Lucas”) in Historias marginales.

The figure of the writer is portrayed then as a figure immersed in the political environment that surrounds him, not as a politician, but from a limited and particular position of his or her role as a creator. According to Peter Bürger, this is precisely one of the characteristics of contemporary art and the result of the artist himself. For the critic,

“[…] aesthetic experience is the positive side of that process by which the social subsystem ‘art’ defines itself as a distinct sphere. Its negative side is the artist’s loss of any social function” (Theory of the Avant-Guarde, 35). This experience is the result of a detachment that occurred when art lost its ritualistic purpose and claimed its autonomy within bourgeois society. For Bürger, “an art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticize it, along with its distance.” (50) In other words, to claim its autonomy, art has detached itself from the “everyday life”; it has to function independently from society, in another space from where it can criticize it.

This dynamic creates an oppositional relationship between art, the artist and the polis. On the one hand, the artist produces its creation and relates to his society from the mediation of aesthetics, which in the case of Los vigilantes is the written word. In that sense, the intervention of the writer comes from a detached place. On the other hand, art or the written word claims its distance from society, in order to be re-immerged in it. Its role in the polis establishes a de-negotiation, which implies both a negotiation within the

along Latin-America, followed the ideological model of the now dissolved Soviet Union. In fact, Cuba, Latin-America’s only “communist” country, implanted a similar model of what is known as Stalinist communism in the early sixties and established a relationship with the soviets that lasted until their dissolution. After the fall of the USSR, Cuba entered into an economical crisis that lasted most of the nineties and that was called “the special period of time” (“el período especial”).

dynamics of the polis and a denial of a process that implies an agreement. This means a detachment from the polis that insists on its participation in it. The aesthetical is then an action per se acting one way or the other from its position as art and into its society and political context. It both negates and negotiates changes within the polis.

The dynamics that art demands within contemporary polis transforms the artist into an alter figure. This trait enables him to present and challenge the macro-discourses of the political by participating in the polis from the space or aesthetics, which compared to the whole context understood here as polis, becomes a micro-narrative (art as part of a public life which includes art, politics, relationships, economics and so on). Therefore, and as I mentioned earlier, the artist is immersed in the political without becoming a politician. It is a political figure whose political actions are reflected from art, therefore, they are indirect manifestations.

As a writer, the mother assumes the artist’s role in Elit’s novel. It is her role to create a world manifested to the reader through the pages of the novel. Within that symbolic construction and with the utilization of language as a metaphor, the writer poses new political considerations that challenge the political context in which the novel is taking place, both within the narrative and within Chile. The dynamic sets a relationship that goes back and forth between fiction and the non-fiction of the polis where the novel is conceived and published. As a result, the written word becomes political without submerging into politics. According to Sandra Lorenzano, this is Diamela Eltit’s achievement on her work, a political written word which does not belong to conventional politics:

Politizar la palabra escrita no es adscribirla a programas partidarios o convertirla en directa denuncia referencial, sino exasperar las

incertidumbres e interrogaciones del signo, proponer un ejercicio incómodo por cuestionador, por inasible, por urticante; es privilegiar la fuga por sobre la norma, el intersticio por sobre la totalidad. (Tres novelas, 13)

[To politicize the written word does not mean to subscribe it to political party programs or transform it into a direct referential denouncing, but to exasperate the uncertainty and inquiries of the sign. It implies an uncomfortable exercise because it questions, it is unattainable, itchy; it means prioritizing the fugue over the norm, the little space over the totality.]

In that sense, the writer becomes a metaphor of the artist, and his medium (the written word), helps him to be inserted in the dynamics of the polis, assuming therefore a denouncing political role. The denunciation is manifested through the written word (art) to insist (and persist) on a critique, which is the motivation for the mother to write her letters:

Solo lo escrito puede permanecer pues las voces y sus sonidos, de manera ineludible, desembocan en el silencio y pueden ser fácilmente acalladas, malinterpretadas, omitidas, olvidadas. Te escribo ahora nada más que para anticiparme a la vergüenza que algún día podría llegar a provocarme el escudarme en el silencio. (121)

[Only the written word inescapably remains, since its voices and sounds lead into silence and could easily be silenced, misunderstood, omitted, forgotten. I write you only to anticipate the shame that could give me if I shield some day in silence.]

The written language becomes then the symbol of a resistance, of a denunciation that is both immediate and/but permanent, working then as a mark that cannot be forgotten and that insists on itself as a symbol of a denouncing.

In Los vigilantes, the main concern of the mother (the one that makes her guilty) is the lives of the “desamparados” or unprotected, those that are the victims of a system that creates inequalities between different social classes. It is their hunger what motivates her writing according to the limited perception of the son:

Ahora mamá está inclinada, escribiendo. Inclinada, mamá se empieza a fundir con la página […] Quiero morderla para que me pegue en mi cabeza de TON TON TON To tonto y deje esa página. Esa página. Cuando pueda decir la palabra hambre esta historia habrá terminado. (38)

[Mom is now sloping, writing. Sloping, mom starts to blend with the page […] I want to bite her so she can smack me in my STU STU STU Stu stupid head so I leave that page alone. That page…This story will end when I can say the word hunger.]

The action of writing is therefore inspired by denouncing hunger and underlining its existence. It is a hunger that does not go away even when the neighbors try to keep it outside by not letting the “unprotected” inside their homes during the frost of the winter, sending them to their death:

Cuentan que las familias agonizaron reclinadas contra los pórticos de los edificios públicos a la espera de que las puertas se abrieran para poder salvar, al menos, a los niños. Dicen que, en esas noches, los funcionarios pusieron doble llave a los candados y aseguraron con celo las ventanas. Los rumores aseguran que los cuerpos de las víctimas fueron retirados en medio de un sigilo que no se puede adjudicar a la forma del duelo sino más bien a una inquietante impunidad. (84)

[They say that the families agonized there, laying against the porch of the public buildings, waiting for the doors to open so they can save the children at least. They say that the employees put double locks to the gates those nights, that they even secured the windows were very closed. Rumor has it that the bodies were removed during a silence that belongs, to the wake of their deaths, but of the most disturbing impunity.]

The mother then confronts these oppressive politics that attempt to erase the unprotected lives of the homeless in the well-established neighborhoods that follow the standards of the West. Her tools are the letters that seek to rescue their bodies from oblivion. Her letters make the homeless present by the written word, and establish a link with the narrator’s writing in Historias marginales. In fact, according to Rubí Carreño the bodies in Eltit’s fiction are those of popular subjects. Eltit wants to underscore their stories even if it means using their bodies as a metaphor of their lives:

[…] la construcción de un sujeto popular que se escapa de las retóricas de la caridad o de la seguridad ciudadana y que, en vez de servir y desaparecer […] o de hablar tras las rejas, cuenta la historia, aunque sea a través de las huellas que dejan en su cuerpo el vino, la tortura o la automutilación. (Diamela Eltit, 16)

[[…] the construction of a popular person that escapes the rhetoric of charity or even social security, that, instead of serve and disappear […] or talk between bars, narrates a story if just by the traces that the wine, torture or self-mutilation leaves on his body.]

Therefore there is complicity between writer and mother that is used to insist on the people that are threatened to disappear by the neoliberal system.

The action of making the “unprotected” present work at two levels; the one just described, where their stories are told along the description of their existence in the letters, and by the mother’s action within the plot to help some of these lives. The second action is revealed later on the novel, after the constant inquiring and demands of the father, along with the neighbors’ denouncements. Letter after letter, the invisible father seems to keep asking about some people she let inside the house, putting at risk his son and the “natural order” of the neighborhood. Near the end of the second part the mother is forced to accept that she, in fact, let some of these people inside the house, to protect them from an inevitable death caused by the winter’s harsh cold. That action is the condemning ultimate act, according to the father and the rest of the community. She is linked with the ostracized from the moment she admits having sheltered the

“unprotected”. Those who do not, belong to the new order, and as a result, are considered anti-social elements, dangerous to that order:

Puede ser, como afirmas, que los desamparados se aboguen crecientemente hacia el afuera para esquivar así el ejercicio de sus responsabilidades, que son rebeldes en extremo peligrosos y junto con la insurrección que portan sus presencias, están entrelazadas en sus cuerpos las peores infecciones. Hablas de los delitos, de las faltas, de los trastornos éticos que están apareciendo a lo largo de las calles, agresiones masivas

que, según tu decir, son adjudicables a los desamparados. Piensas que la única defensa que nos resta es de hacer nuestras casas una fortaleza pues la ciudad ya se ha transformado en un espacio intransitable […] No pensé, reconozco, en lo que tú tan bien pareces comprender, no tuve en mente nada más que el terror de enfrentarme a seres que estaban destinados a una muerte segura. Si yo no los acogía, el fin para ellos era cuestión de horas. No vi en sus cuerpos esa deliberada insurrección a la que te refieres, sólo reparé en el frío, en la terrible consecuencia del frío sobre unos organismos totalmente desprovistos. (98)

[It could be as you say, that the unprotected increase to be isolated on purpose, just to avoid their social responsibilities. They could be a dangerous extremist rebels and the insurrection that their presence represents could bring the worse kind of infections. You talk about their crimes, their faults, of the ethical disruptions all along the streets, massive aggressions that, according to you, happen because of them. You think that our only line of defense is to transform our houses into fortresses, that the city has become impossible […] I must confess it didn’t occurred to me what you understand so well, I only thought about the terror of facing human beings who were destined to a certain death. If I didn’t take care of them, they would have meet their end in just a couple of hours. I didn’t see that deliberate insurrection that you refer to. I only thought of the cold, en the terrible consequences of the cold over such organisms in need.]

The justification provided for her actions by the mother are ultimately humanitarian; namely, to protect them from the cold, to provide them with her home. However, the new order of the polis sees with distrust these alien elements. In helping them she alienates herself, she becomes dangerous while underlining her trait as an alternative figure.

The alienation of the writer or identification with the marginalized figure and the written word that supports the exception over the norm establishes another link with Luis

Sepúlveda’s Historias marginales. I have already mentioned some of the “untold stories” that motivate the narrator (Sepúlveda’s fictional alter-ego) in telling these tales. However, of all the “marginal” characters it is the story of “Cavatori” the one that establishes a direct link with the “unprotected” of Los vigilantes. The narrative presents a group of marble masons who lose their lives thanks to a system that does not provide for their safety:

Durante el funeral, el único artista presente dijo que esos dos cavatori eran mártires que habían muerto por el arte. Pero otro de aquellos trabajadores escupió el toscano que colgaba de sus labios y precisó: no, murieron porque falta seguridad, murieron por un sueldo de mierda. (71)

[During the wake, the only present artist said that those two cavatori were martyrs who died in the name of art. But another of those workers spitted the cigar that was on his lips and clarified: no, they died because they lacked security; they died for a shitty paycheck.]

The lack of security for the labor and the inhuman conditions workers are submitted just to obtain minerals and stones resonate both with Mano de obra, as well as with the spreading neo-liberal system. On the one hand, the death of these workers as a result of bad labor conditions reminds readers of the finger that Sonia looses in the supermarket, where she is forced to cut chickens and meat at a velocity that endangers her. On the other hand, Sepúlveda’s story resonates with the famous case of the mineworkers in San

José, Chile in 2010, as they were trapped in the mines while working under a lack of security and protection. The publicity that received the rescue mission and the spectacle used by the President of Chile Sebastián Piñera for political gain (it augmented his poll approval numbers in a 63% according to Time Magazine)18 overshadowed the reasons of why the miners were trapped in the first place and how to avoid these events, which are common on that job and a risk workers face every day in order to sustain their families.

The main media and the government kept those reasons as silent as the death of the unprotected in Los vigilantes. The logic behind this silence is that the price of “progress” is worth the risk and that these employees are being paid after all. The opposition or

18 See Nelsen, Aaron, “After the Miner’s Triumph: How Chile’s President lost his Mojo” Time. 6 Dec. 2013

critique of this logic leads to a precarious survival, which is precisely what Lorenzano explains is at stake in Eltit’s writing.

A precarious survivor is also what is left of the mother in Los vigilantes once she sides with the marginalized. In fact, her punishment is to be outcast along with her son.

Having lost her house and on the streets, she becomes unprotected like the homeless she was defending, fulfilling her role as an exiled of a political system she refused to be part of. The polis, as structured in the neighborhood of Los vigilantes, does not allow any difference. The polis under the neo-liberal system is a homogeneous corpus and any questioning is to be considered a challenge to that order, in other words, a danger to the constitution of the polis:

Me acusas de ser la responsable de un pensamiento que, según tú, alude a una posición asombrosamente ambigua, o que mis aseveraciones, como has dicho, son el resultado del efecto anestésico de un peligroso sueño. […] Con tus juicios, quieres hacer de mí la imagen de una mujer que miente. Una mujer que miente, impulsada por un creciente delirio […] tus palabras representan el modo más conocido y alevoso de la descalificación. De esa manera es que te niegas a aceptar que mi vecina me vigila y vigila a tu hijo […] (53)

You blame me of being responsible for a line of thought that alludes to an ambitious position. You also consider my claims to be anesthetic effects of a dangerous dream. […] Your judgments want to turn me into the image of a lying woman. A lying woman, impulse by an outgrowing delirium […] your words represent the most known and premeditated form of disqualification. That’s the way you refuse to accept that my neighbors is watching me as well as she watches your son […] ]

She is exiled from the polis, ostracized and invalidated because her political views are a threat to the father’s reality. Therefore, mother-writer becomes an outcast, as she is one of the bodies that threaten the new order, one of the bodies that have to disappear from the always-suspicious imposition of the gaze (by the father, his mother, and the neighbors). Moreover, her association with the marginalized fed the fears of an

association of these rejected bodies and the risk of them taking over the model the neighbors sought to implant:

Temían que yo tuviera una alianza con los desamparados, decían que un complot contra la armonía de Occidente se extendía por la ciudad y que todas sus casas estaban en la mira de una insurrección que aún no tenía forma nítida. (93)

[They feared that I made an alliance with the unprotected, they said there was a complot against the West expanding all over the city and that all of their houses were the target of an insurrection that hadn’t a shape yet.]

The fear that “anti-social” elements came together and improve their numbers establishes a parallel between the new political order and the dictatorship that Eltit witnessed. It was the threat to the capitalist model what motivated the coup d’etat against President

Salvador Allende. Furthermore, the murders, imprisonments and disappearances responded to the fear that any communist member (the Marxist Cancer according to the

Military Press Conference in September 11, 1973)19 could be a threat to the regime and to the economical model they favored. The new regime also believed that any communist or leftist could revolt in arms as happened in Cuba. In the same manner, the questioning of the new order established since the dictatorship resonates with the fears of the old regime:

[…] estás a la espera de mi levantamiento en donde mi insurrección se enfrente con la tuya y me obligues, de una vez y para siempre, a medir nuestras fuerzas. Pero no te otorgaré ese placer, porque yo sé que no sabes cuáles son las fuerzas que me mueven, con qué fuerzas, que no sean las tuyas, me mantengo, a pesar de la hostilidad de todos los climas y eso te exaspera. (66)

[ […] you are in alert of my rebellion, where my insurrection faces yours and you force me, once and for all, to measure our strength. But I’ll not

19 Augusto Pinochet led this press conference, which has been inserted deeply in the Chilean psyche. Many artists have responded to that discourse by making direct allusion to that speech, from poets like Raúl Zurita and Hector Montecinos, to film makers like Andrés Wood’s Machuca.

give you that pleasure because I know you don’t know which forces motivate me, what strength, besides yours, I support myself, all beyond the hostility of the atmosphere, and that drives you crazy.]

The mother therefore claims that her strengths are different from those of the father. He has the power to suppress, to exile, to submit her, while she has the power to question, to critique, to survive his oppression. At the same time, her power lies in her capability to act, to intervene in favor of the unprotected people. According to Hannah Arendt, power derives from our capacity to act. Thus the mother’s actions reveal her power as part of her interaction in the neighborhood. Her strength and resistance, on the other hand, does not follow the logic imposed by the ones in power, as she reaffirms her will even beyond the oppressive forces that condemn her.20 Even after the excessive use of force, her ideals, which the father rejects as a “dream” (as Allende’s democratic socialist project itself) refuses to be silenced.

The link between the mother and the political projects of the past reaffirms once again the notion of the writer (artist) as a political figure participating in the polis.

However, because of the de-negotiation implied within the dynamics of aesthetics and the polis, the denouncement or political needs to be represented by a figure forced out of the polis. In other words, the political participation and capacity of acting is limited to a(n) (alienated) work from the outside and from an outsider. That is the reason why the role of the artist is represented by a mother, who creates life (the son), but whose life is limited, symbolized in the fragmented sentences of the boy. It is also the reason why they both end up exiled from the house, judged by the words themselves:

20 Another link with the past and Allende’s farewell discourse of force over reason.

Si las pruebas contundentes de este juicio radicaron en lo escrito, lo escrito es la razón de mi condena. Pero quiero insistir, y eso se sabe, que jamás escribí cartas, sólo escribí para no llenarme de vergüenza. (125)

[If the convincing evidence against me during this trial is based on what was written, the written word is the reason of my sentence. I want to insist, however, that I never wrote letters, I only wrote to not be filled with regret.]

The result of the trial, where the mother seems to sink lower than the son, clearly redefines the trinity of father-mother-son. The father is the law (hence the Father) that expels her from an artificial paradise, the mother is the creator who has to work from the outside and who is an outsider herself, and the unfulfilled son is limited to answer the questions the mother imposes. The novel concludes then with the dissolution of the written word, which was the fighting tool of the mother during the novel:

Levantamos nuestros rostros hasta el último, último, el último cielo que está en llamas, y nos quedamos fijos, hipnóticos, inmóviles, como perros AAUUUU AAUUUU AAUUUU aullando hacia la luna. (139)

[Let raise our heads until the last, last, last glimpse of the sky that it is on fire, and let stay fixed, hypnotic, immobilized, like dogs AAUUUU AAUUUU AAUUUU howling to the moon.]

This dissolution of language underlines that the political involvement of art within the polis follows its own logics. In fact, it echoes the existence of the son, whose lack of language brings him to an animalistic level. In other words, his own language likens him to the beast and the savage, which are the emblems of fear in Western society (the un- civilized).

The son’s lack of language and its link with art and/or the written world, challenges the conventional ideologies immersed in the polis. In the case of art, the expression challenges the political system itself. According to Jaques Baudrillard, “art has become quotation, re-appropriation, and gives the impression of an indefinite

resuscitation of its own forms”. (Conspiracy, 55) The son’s language is precisely a re- appropriation of the logic of the Father by insisting and challenging the form (of the written language), and this is the reason for the “stream of consciousness” and fragmented sentences that shape the novel all along. The language of the son represents therefore a challenge to the logic of the West by re-appropriating them (their fears). At the same time, this new language represents a re-appropriation of art. It is a language disconnected from the one used in the polis that could lead to a lesser chance of a political result within the polis, but at the same time, a language which insists on denouncing from its queerness. In other words, it is a language that alienates itself from the popular use of language but that insists on its potential to challenge the politics imposed in the community. It is from that new language (an alternative voice) that art can respond to the polis.

The de-negotiation of aesthetics within the polis is also represented in Historias marginales and in Los detectives salvajes. On the one hand, both texts delineate a political project that underlines the necessity to represent a marginal reality in order to reinsert it in the modern polis. On the other hand, by assuming their role as fictional representations (written word) they renounce any political connotation. This becomes clear when both texts represent the political realities of the respective timelines in their plots as a mere background. In other words, the political intentions are working behind the narrative with their placing in the middle of these historical events, but at the same time, they are denied of direct relevance, underlining the role of these fictions as fictions and not mere political discourses.

Some of the stories that follow that de-negotiation in Historias marginales are

“Juanpa” and “Los Mellizos Duarte” (“The Duarte Twins”). As I mentioned earlier, the first story is about an editor who dared to write against Pinochet and, as a result, became his private prisoner:

Juanpa estuvo siempre en la mira del dictador, pero su inteligencia perversa y la de sus asesores civiles llamados Onofre Jarpa y Jaime Guzmán, le indicaron que asesinarlo o desaparecerlo le traería complicaciones internacionales. […] Tras esta elemental reflexión, la bestia uniformada decidió que Juanpa sería su prisionero personal, su víctima privada. […] Juanpa estuvo siete veces en la cárcel, y nunca dejó de escribir. (114)

[Juanpa was always at the dictator’s target, but his perverse intelligence along with that of Onofre Jarpa and Jaime Guzmán, his civil advisors, told him that his assassination of disappearance would bring him international heat. […] After an elementary reflection, the uniformed beast decided that Juanpa would be his personal prisoner, his private victim. […] Juanpa was in jail seven times, and he never stopped writing.]

As it is the case with the mother in Los vigilantes, not even the oppressive figure of the father (Pinochet) overcomes the force that motivated “Juanpa”. In “Los mellizos Duarte” on the other hand, it is the Argentinean dictatorship that causes the death of one of the twins:

Todo el mundo al cuartel para declarar y conforme lo hacíamos nos iban soltando, hasta que un milico dijo que mi hermano Telmo no era uruguayo ni trapecista sino argentino y guerrillero. Nos defendimos como pudimos, mostramos certificados de nacimiento, recortes de periódicos internacionales, les rogamos que nos miraran, éramos iguales, pero ellos insistieron y se lo llevaron al otro lado del Río de La Plata. Nunca más supe de él. (20)

[We all went to the station for interrogation and they kept letting us out after we declared. That until a military soldier said that my brother Telmo was not Uruguayan or a trapeze artist but Argentinean and guerrilla. We tried to make our case the best we could, we showed our birth certificates, pieces of international newspapers, we begged them to look at us, that we were identical, but they insisted and took him to the other side of the La Plata River. I never heard from him again.]

The political background affects both stories, but they are not about those events; rather, they are about the lives and stories that survived the oppression of the political. Their stories are the representation that defies the horror and trauma of the dictatorship.

Los detectives salvajes also follows this technique. According to Ezequiel de

Rosso, Bolaño’s technique is to mingle the everyday life with the complexity of a geography that goes beyond a specific nation:

Bolaño posee un especial talento para unir lo divertido con lo dramático, para integrar las aventuras literarias en las sórdidas aventuras de la vida, para reconstruir con eficacia la dinámica de espacios geográficos que le son familiares como México, Santiago de Chile, París o Cataluña, y para dar un contenido político (el golpe de estado de Pinochet, el mayo de 1968 mexicano) y humano sin caer en la rigidez ideológica o en el moralismo. (Roberto Bolaño, 65)

[Bolaño has an special talent in mixing fun with dramatic, to integrate the literary adventures into the sordid adventures of life, to rebuild with efficiency the dynamic of the different geographic spaces so familiar to him like Mexico, Santiago de Chile, Paris, or Cataluña, and to give a political (Pinochet’s coup, Mexican May, 1968) and human touch as well without falling into ideological rigidity or into moralism.]

In that sense, the reader finds a series of political events that are part of the narrative background of the multiple characters taking part in the story. In fact, the link between politics and literature is even expressed by one of the characters, Laura, who says that their favorite, if not the only, topics were politics and literature. (231) Arturo, on the other hand, is a Chilean that, even when he escaped from jail after the coup of 1973 in

Chile, goes to Mexico, and even when he tries to embrace the cosmopolitanism of a voyager, he has a few moments where he reminds the reader of the political events that were happening during those years in his birth country of Chile. The most emblematic reminder comes when he is searching for Cesárea Tinajero all over Mexico and confronts a secretary of a library who threatens him with deportation:

¿Adónde?, gritó Belano. Pues a su país, joven, dijo la secretaria. ¿Es usted analfabeta?, dijo Belano, ¿no ha leído que soy chileno?, ¡mejor sería pegarme un tiro en la boca! (591)

[To where?, Belano yelled. Well to your country Young man, said the secretary. Are you illiterate?, said Belano, haven’t you read that I am Chilean?, You better put a bullet in my mouth!]

The implications of returning to Chile, after fighting to defend the government of

President Allende, were catastrophic and even lethal.

The political situation of Chile is not the only one described in Los detectives salvajes. In fact, the novel underlines the political connections between Chile and

Argentina when the character of Norman Bolzman is offering his “testimony”. Talking to

Claudia and in response to her worry for Ulises Lima, Bolzman hears her connection with the Argentine dictatorship:

Dijo que su hermano mayor había muerto en Argentina, posiblemente torturado por la policía o por el ejército y que eso sí era serio. Dijo que su hermano mayor había luchado en las filas del ERP y que había creído en la Revolución Americana y eso era muy serio. Dijo que si ella o su familia hubieran estado en la Argentina para cuando se desató la represión posiblemente ahora estarían muertos. Dijo todo eso y luego se puso a llorar. (293)

[She said that her older brother died in Argentina, probably tortured by the police or by the military and that really was serious. She said that her older brother fought in the lines of the ERP and that she had believed in the American Revolution and that was really serious. She said that if she or her family had remained in Argentina back when the repression started they would have been dead by now. She said all of that and then she started crying.]

At that moment her testimony serves as a mean to represent the violence of two different nations with identical political policies and motivations.

On the other hand, even when most of the novel is about a poetic movement that followed the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ideas of the seventies (even when it was inspired by the avant-garde movements of the beginning of the century), the Visceral

Realist is described by another character as a political movement, which is the impression of character Rafael Barrios:

Y yo a veces los miraba y pese al cariño que sentía por ellos pensaba ¿qué clase de teatro es éste?, ¿qué clase de fraude o de suicidio colectivo es éste? Y una noche, poco antes del año nuevo de 1976, poco antes de que se marcharan a Sonora, comprendí que era su manera de hacer política. Una manera que yo ya no comparto y que entonces no entendía, que no sé si era buena o mala, correcta o equivocada, pero que era su manera de hacer política, de incidir políticamente en la realidad […] (321)

[Sometimes I looked at them, and beyond the love that I had them I thought, what kind of theatre is this? what kind of fraud or of collective suicide is this? And then one night, a little before the New Year of 1976, a little before they left to Sonora, I understood that it was their way of doing politics. A way of doing politics that I don’t share and I didn’t understood, that I don’t know if it was good or bad, right or wrong, but that it was their way of doing politics, of politically intervene with reality […] ]

Barrios’ testimony links poetry (art) with politics, or better yet, as a way of doing politics, a way to influence the polis.

The importance of politics behind these fictions is symbolized in the main two characters, but especially in Ulises Lima. As a result, we get to see this character in a jail in Israel (near a fabric of nuclear bombs), or going to fight in the Nicaraguan revolutionary war of the Sandinistas, even when he just goes with no political motivation whatsoever.

The transnational connection is underscored with the “testimony” of one of the characters in the novel, Auxilio Lacouture, who illustrates how the political shapes the stories without been a story about the political events that happened in the past:

Yo estaba en la facultad cuando el ejército violó la autonomía y entró en el campus a detener o a matar a todo el mundo. No. En la universidad no hubo muchos muertos. Fue en Tlatelolco. ¡Ese nombre que quedaría en nuestra memoria para siempre! (192)

[I was in the Faculty when the military violated its autonomy and entered campus to detain or kill everybody. No. there weren’t that man dead in the

University, that was in Tlatelolco, the name that would remain in our memories forever!]

Using the year of 1968 as a background emphasizes the time where the “testimony” takes place, but it produces geometrical resonances in terms of where the political incidences take place. The use of that emblematic year not only recreates the events of the Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico,21 but also it echoes the political turmoil of other countries, from

Europe (Paris) to Latin America, and this shaped and inspired the political and artistic movements of the seventies until the arrival of the military dictatorships in Latin-

America. Therefore the political is not limited to a specific place and, like Belano and

Lima, is moving all along the world (with the exception of Asia).

However, the whole movement of the “Visceral Realists” is a mock, not only of the artistic movements of that time, but of the pretentions of art itself as an alternative to society. As a result both characters are questioned in the novel when they are described by Alfonso Pérez Camarga:

Belano y Lima no eran revolucionarios. No eran escritores. A veces escribían poesía, pero tampoco creo que fueran poetas. Eran vendedores de droga. Parecían, en el fondo, dos extraterrestres. Pero conforme iban adquiriendo confianza, conforme los ibas conociendo o escuchando con más atención, su pose resultaba más bien triste, provocaba el rechazo. No eran poetas, ciertamente, no eran revolucionarios, creo que ni siquiera estaban sexuados. ¿Qué quiero decir con eso? Pues que el sexo no parecía interesarles (sólo les interesaba el dinero que nos pudieran exprimir), así como tampoco la poesía ni la política, aunque su apariencia pretendiera amoldarse al arquetipo tan manido del joven poeta de izquierda. Pero no, el sexo no les interesaba, me consta, seguro. ¿Qué cómo lo sé? Por una amiga, una amiga arquitecta que quiso coger con uno

21 The Tlatelolco massacre of the “Tlatelolco’s Night” (“noche de Tlatelolco” ) was a massacre executed by the government that killed many students and civilians in Octuber 2, 1968. For further reading see Poniatowska, Elena (trans. by Lane, Helen R.), Massacre in Mexico, New York: Viking, 1975.

de ellos. Belano, supongo. Y a la hora de la verdad no pasó nada. Vergas muertas. (328, 329-0)

[Belano and Lima weren’t revolutionaries. They weren’t writers either. They would write poetry sometimes, but I doubt that they were poets. They were drug sellers. At the end, they even looked like aliens. But once they started to get comfortable, once you started to know them or paying more attention to them, you realized they posse was sad more than anything else, it provoked your rejection. They weren’t poets, they weren’t revolutionaries by any means, I think they didn’t even care for sex. What do I mean by that? Well, that they don’t seem interested by sex (they only cared about the money they could get out of us), nor by poetry or politics, though their appearance tried to mold to the lefty young poet archetype. But no, they weren’t interested in sex, I can assure that. How do I know that? A friend, an architect friend that wanted to fuck with one of them. Belano, I suppose. In the moment of truth, nothing happened. Dead dicks.]

Both characters are therefore posers instead of artists, which immediately questions the main images of the novel of the “artist”, given that they were the founders of the

“Visceral Realists’” movement. In fact, the other poet, García Belano, is even denied by

Ernesto García Grajales; “¿Juan García Madero? No, ése no me suena. Seguro que nunca perteneció al grupo. Hombre, si lo digo yo que soy la máxima autoridad en la materia, por algo será” (551) (Juan García Madero? No, that name doesn’t sound familiar. He wasn’t part of the group for sure. Man if I tell you so, that I’m a maximum authority on the matter, there must be a reason.). Art itself is therefore questioned all over the novel with the failure of the movement, the pretentiousness of it, and the plain discarding of literature as a mean to influence outside its field. Even one of the characters, Lisandro

Morales, plainly expresses in his “testimony” that “literature is worth nothing” (“La literatura no vale nada”, 300). In that sense, Bolaño mocks these ideals as juvenile, while making a political comment of the times. The fact that he uses a lot of political events as a background to the different plots also suggest a re-appropriation of these events, incorporating them into art but, at the same time, granting them another stage to make a

presence. In other words, making sure that these events are not forgotten and that they have new readers who will learn about them.

Los detectives salvajes therefore responds to the political while being immersed in a global context which crosses the specificities of Chile, the Southern Cone and Latin

America. Blending the literary complexity of the novel and elements of pop-narrative, the novel underlines the complexity of a political context which is a reality for the writer, mainly the editorial need to sell books. This means that, even when the novel deals with different political elements, it is also submerged within the political logics of late- capitalism.

2.2 Domestic vs. Public

The response of Los detectives salvajes to our contemporary political system sets up a net of links with the other writers under analysis, not only in the way they respond to the need of going beyond the national borders of Chile, but on how they represent the dynamics of the specific within a broader context. In fact, the dynamics of the specific versus a broader context is one of the main concerns in Eltit’s novels. Los vigilantes,

Jamás el fuego nunca, and Mano de obra share that apprehension, specifically in terms of the private (specific) versus the public space (broader context).

Jamás el fuego nunca is the maximum example that Diamela Eltit provides on that matter. The only two characters of the novel are trapped within the limited space of their house, rotting themselves in their age and sickness. In that sense, both are trapped within the domestic space, a house that is their last stop after a life outside of it. The memories of the woman (wife) are the ones that underscore a contrast between that domestic space and the public space, in which they used to have an active part.

However, Jamás el fuego nunca inherits a contrast between the domestic space and the public space that is also represented in both Los vigilantes and Mano de obra. In the latter, it is the logic of the market that shapes the lives of the characters. The market is therefore the symbol of the polis or the public space. However, the public space intervenes with the private space once the characters apply the logics of the supermarket to their house. In that sense, every character becomes suspicious of the other, they are in constant threat of been expelled from the house, and they have a leader (Enrique) who echoes the manager and ends up firing them all.

The influence of the public life is better exemplified in two cases: the drug habits of Pedro and Sonia’s accident. Pedro is an example of how the public space shapes the domestic space. Along the story, he develops an alcohol problem that is later complicated with a coke addiction. However, what used to be his practices in his work-space are soon brought to the house:

[…] estábamos apenados porque Enrique amenazaba con golpear a Pedro, “sí, matar a este concha de su madre que no se da cuenta que los supervisores están a punto de cagarlo porque el huevón anda con la cabeza no sé dónde y hoy casi se le escapa el ladrón culiado con unas sopas metidas en la chaqueta y si no fuera por mí, que le avisé, lo habrían echado”. […] Ay, así era. Pedro había llegado demasiado lejos […] aunque, después de todo, el pobre Pedro tenía que darse sus gustos luego de pasar gran parte del día en el cuarto de registro revisando a los falsos clientes que se metían los productos en cualquier parte […] Y ahora parecía haberle perdido el respeto y el cariño. Sin una gota de comprensión le gritaba a Pedro delante de nosotros para avergonzarlo abiertamente cuando entraba desesperado, con las aletas de la nariz temblorosas e hinchadas, mientras, desde el interior de sus fosas nasales, le goteaba la sangre hasta el labio y él (pobrecito Pedro) se limpiaba la sangre con el dorso de su mano “le sale sangre a este concha de su madre de puro vicioso que es” y Pedro se alejaba, con su mano sangrienta, a buscar con urgencia un poquito de paz en el interior de su pieza. Caminaba hasta su pieza para encontrar esa molécula de estímulo que necesitaba su nariz y, así, reparar el día. […] Por ese motivo, cuando Enrique se iba a dormir y, escuchábamos el estertor de sus ronquidos, nosotros

aspirábamos con Pedro en su pieza. Aspirábamos (ahhhhh) (ahhhhh) con los ojos completamente en blanco, como si nos hubieses dado un palo en la cabeza con una descarga eléctrica o nos sorprendieran con la violencia de un manguerazo. (354-5)

[ […] we were ashamed because Enrique was threatening to hit Pedro, “yes, I want to kill that son of a bitch that doesn’t realize his superiors are about to fuck him over because the asshole has his head I don’t know where and today he almost let a fucking thieve escape with soups under his jacket. If it wasn’t because I warned him, he would have been fired”. […] Yep, like that. Pedro has gone too far […] though poor Pedro needed his little recreational habits after all, as he has to be in that room most of the day, checking on all the false clients that would hide merchandise all over them to try and steal it […] It seemed like he lost all the respect and love he had for him. He yelled to Pedro with no regard to him and in front of us, so he could shame him when he was desperate, with his shaking nostrils swelled up, while blood was coming out of them down to his lip, and he (poor Pedro) cleaned the blood with the back of his hand “son of a bitch is bleeding for being a fucking drug addict” and Pedro just backed off, with his hand full of blood, desperately looking for a little peace in the apartment. He would go to his room looking for a molecule of that stuff that ignited his nose, and save the day, just like that. […] As such, we waited for Enrique to go to sleep until we could hear the rattle of his snores, to join Pedro and snort some stuff with him in his room. Snoring (ahhhhh) (ahhhhh) with our rolling eyes, as if we were smacked with a stick some electricity on the head, or as if we were surprised by fire hose.]

At that moment, the private space echoes the public space, as the pressure inside the house “pushes” the others to snort cocaine when Enrique, the house’s “supervisor”, was not watching. At the same time, Eltit builds a parallel with the violence exercised by the public space during the dictatorship. The violence of drug consumption is translated “as if” it were one and the same with the regular practice of Pinochet’s regime of an electric shock or the common practice of the hosing down manifestations by the police, which they still do today.

The situation also comes as a result to the threat of being fired, and this threat reduces the employees’ bodies to replaceable objects, merchandise from the store that can be easily traded, is also the threat to be expelled from the house. In that sense, Pedro’s

case is just another example of a behavior that interrupted the balance inside the private space but, as the house itself, it is an extension of the intolerable situation in the store.

On the other hand, Sonia’s accident is the metaphor of the condition of the body within the logic of the market. As a result of her transfer to the meat shop, Sonia is forced to cut chickens and meat at a fast pace, which leads to her cutting her finger off. The accident leads her to be transferred once again to the fish section. However, the accident serves as a denouncement of a system where the bodies are disposable and ready to be replaced, not only with the threat of being fired, but the threat of their own lives, as velocity and production is the only thing that matters. It is no coincidence that the accident comes as a result of her ability to be fast. In that sense, the logic of the market demands that human bodies are transformed into machines: fast, precise, and productive.

These elements will guarantee that the order of capitalism remains intact, as it is quantity the equivalent of productivity. The faster the meat is cut, the more it can be sold to the clients and the more profit.

It is also important that Sonia does not die in the accident. It is her finger the one to be lost and mixed with the rest of the cut meat:

Sí, la pobrecita Sonia, aún incrédula ante la pérdida de su dedo índice. Sí, ella misma (la pobre Sonia) mutilada por la maniobra fatal realizada con el filo de su propia hacha. Y, allí, en el centro del mesón, su dedo (insignificante) rodando impune, después que se hubiera desencadenado un corte profundo, limpio, perfecto, quirúrgico. Y, claro, ella no pudo sino observar, estupefacta e indecisa, su mano atropellada y velada por la sangre (a borbotones, a borbotones). La pobre Sonia condenada al fluir de su sangre (impura/humana/inadmisible) que inundaba, con su nuevo espesor, el mesón de la carnicería. Y su dedo, al final de una loca y repugnante carrera, terminaba confundido con los aborrecibles restos de pollo. (246)

[Yes, poor Sonia, still couldn’t believed the loss of her index finger. Yes, poor Sonia mutilated by a fatal maneuver of her own ax. And there, in the center of the desk, her (insignificant) finger rolling unpunished, after there 60

was a deep cut, clean, perfect, and surgical. Of course that she there was nothing to do but to look, stupefied and indecisive, her injured hand veiled by her own blood (lots of it, lots of it). Poor Sonia was condemned to the stream of her blood (impure/human/inadmissible) that flooded the desk of the butchery with a new thickness. Her finger, at the end of an insane and repulsive journey, ended up camouflaged with the loathsome remains of chicken.]

Placing the finger with the rest of the food situates Sonia in the merchandise’s place. In other words, she is also an object to be sold within the logics of the market. That is the reason why the accident is inconvenient to the supervisors, and her blood “inadmissible”.

Sonia, as an employee, is shown to the clients as a part of the market that ensures the quality of the other products they will consume. The accident, however, is a disruption to the image the store wants to sell where everything works right and fast. The spectacle of the accident disrupts that image and it stops circulation, therefore affecting the production chain and, ultimately and most importantly, affecting sales.

The accident, which occurs within the public space, also invades the private space of the house:

Pero no, no, nunca la tristeza nocturna que la embargaba mientras caminaba hasta su pieza con una impronta de mansedumbre ovina, aunque finalmente, comprensiva hacia el rencor que nos provocaba. Porque Gabriel tenía razón “es culpa de la culpada”, una culpa que nos hacía todavía más infelices y redoblada el malestar […] mientras la pobrecita Sonia se ponía una toalla entre sus piernas, encuclillada en un borde del pasillo “la culpada cochina y exhibicionista” porque le había bajado la regla y la sangre corría arrastrando unos coágulos densos, una masa viscosa y móvil que hedía con una degradación sin límites […] La sangre y los coágulos parecían recordarle a Sonia el peor momento de su delito. Y doblada en el pasillo “esta chancha hedionda quiere que la miremos” […] (347-8)

[But no, no, never the sadness that overwhelmed her at night while going to her room, docile as a sheep, though, at the end, she understood out rancor. Because Gabriel was right “it’s the blamed fault”, a fault that made us even more unhappy and doubled our discomfort […] while poor Sonia put a sanitary pad between her legs, laying back in a corner of the hall “the blamed and exhibitionist pig” because she was on her period and the blood

flowed along with dense clots, a viscose and mobile mass that stank with an unlimited decay […] The blood and clots seemed to remind Sonia the worse moment of her crime. And bended in the hall “this hideous pig wants us to look at her” […] ]

The menstrual blood mirrors the result of the accident, tying the situation of the public sphere with the situation inside the house once again. It is the body and its fluids the ones to underscore the trauma of the event. However, this trauma is the metaphor of the political system, imposed to the citizens without any other alternative, an echo of the oppressive state of the dictatorship, an oppression that has outlived Pinochet’s regime. It is no coincidence the violence that has been exercised all over Chile by the “carabineros”

(police) as a result of the student movement that demands a free superior education. The use of violence as a mean to impose a political agenda remains executed by the state even in the supposed democracy. That violence of the political system is therefore translated to

Sonia’s blood. As a result, Sonia can only look at her severed hand and accept her tragedy, along with the other characters in Mano de obra. The lack of alternatives is reflected even in Gabriel’s call to regroup and turn off the page. In fact, he is only viewed as Enrique’s successor after he looks “whiter” thanks to the change of light, reflecting the desire to follow the mirage of the West, which is so common in Chile and most of Latin-

American culture. The oppressive imposition is also reflected in Los vigilantes, where the mother is forced to “live precariously” because of her confrontation with the Father.

The importance of the dynamic between private versus public space lies in its links with the role of contemporary art in the polis. In other words, these dynamics reflect the role of art and artist within the modern polis and the people that takes part in it. The artist, as a subject, is limited to engage within the public sphere with his art. He/she conceives his/her narrative in the isolation of his private space. However, because art is

not considered as such until is exteriorized, it needs to establish a connection to the public space. It is with the medium of his work (art) that the artist attempts to have a role in the community or, considering that politics are considered to be tied with public affairs, the contemporary polis. Therefore, the subject uses the object (art, which is transformed in a commodity inside the polis) as a way to link the public space with the private space. It is a relationship that goes back and forth, as the individual is also shaped by the public space, which is what takes place in the novels at hand. In the case of the artist however, he/she responds to the public space from the private space, a cycle that is completed when the work of art (novel in these cases) are released to the public. It is in that moment that art becomes political and attempts to inspire political responses that surpass the limitations of the place of aesthetics.

However, as I have mentioned earlier, the political response is expressed in the form of a denouncement, a political intervention that refuses to be political. In the case of

Sonia’s accident, not only reflects the relationship between the private and public space, it works as another example of how Eltit uses fiction to critique the political system that takes place in Chile. The event resembles the accident of the marble workers in

“Cavatori”, as well as the case of the miners trapped in 2010 in San José. Once again the novel emphasizes the deficiencies of a system that favors economical gain over people who are forced to work under precarious conditions in order to survive. The written word represents those deficiencies that the political system tried to silence, much as the lives tried to be overlooked in Los vigilantes.

The other political resonance caused by the written word is the recovery of memory. In fact, theorists like Idelber Avelar and Nelly Richard have explained about the

importance of literature in post-dictatorship of the Southern Cone to recover elements of history that were silenced during the homogenous politics of dictatorship. Such endeavor turns the work of art and/or the written word into a politically charged instrument to challenge the discourses of the government. Nonetheless, the new work of Eltit is symbolic enough to be about the recovery of a collective memory as much as any other topic that was or is attempted to be erased from public debate. The disappeared bodies in

Los vigilantes point to the disappeared bodies in the dictatorship, but given that they are disappeared in the novel to cover the extreme poverty that exists in that fictional neighborhood, the significance of those bodies lies on the perception of the reader.

Contrasting with the abstract levels of those bodies, Historias marginales is about recovering those stories that were faced with oblivion. However, the stories are more character centered, reducing the possible interpretation of recovering some aspect of the collective memory that was silenced before. The story of “Juanpa” seems to be the exception, but when inserted in the middle of all the other characters, his “history” also becomes a personal story that works as a fictional testimony of the common-man.

Fictional testimony is what builds most of the pages of Los detectives salvajes.

However, all of these characters also attempt to recover, not a collective memory, but their “individual” memories, as well as Lima and Belano (unless the stories of Lima and

Belano are understood as metaphors of a collective memory, which is what all of these characters remember in common). They reconstruct the lives of the main characters by a recount of events that belongs more to art, poetry and their personal experiences, than to the historical weight of the fictional testimony. In any case, Bolaño reflects the act of

testimony to hint a collective memory that surpasses national frontiers and connects different countries along the globe.

However, the metaphor becomes contradictory as that memory is mostly artificial.

As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas stresses out, “[…] in this book filled with testomonies, it seems that everyone lost their memory.” (Roberto Bolaño 66) ([…] en esta obra llena de testimonios,, parece ser que todos han perdido la memoria.) Therefore, if the intention of these fictional testimonies is to recover the memory of Lima and

Belano, they fail in being accurate because their memory is also lost. In fact, María

Antonieta Flores explains that these testimonies, that try to give a presence to the main characters, can only do so by their absence; “the heroes get lost in oblivion, blurred. Their permanence there is based in ther absence.” (Roberto Bolaño 94) (Los héroes se pierden en el olvido, desdibujados. Su permanencia está en su ausencia.) (Roberto Bolaño 94) As a result, both characters end up being a lost memory, with no present, hence, no future, which is why the last pages go back to 1976. In that sense, both story lines are brought together by the different stories, giving them a presence very similar as how both Ulises

Lima and Arturo Belano are described in more than one occasion: ghosts or zombies. At the same time that presence resembles the characters of Jamás el fuego nunca and Los vigilantes, whose stories are represented by the absence of the characters; the reason why they are nameless characters that resemble pictures without a face.

Bolaño then underlines that any attempt to recover a collective memory is limited to the artificiality of individual memory and interpretation. The latter, as art itself, need to be mediated by language to be expressed. It is also based on a subjective selection of past events that are expressed to create an illusion of continuity, whether it ultimately serves

its purpose of recovering what was almost erased from the polis. In other words, for

Bolaño, the act of recovering a collective memory can only be done by an artificial reconstruction and, in that sense; aesthetics is a useful space.

2.3 The Law of the Father

The intention of recovering what was erased from the contemporary polis since dictatorship and beyond represents defiance against the established order of that same polis. As result, that order is represented as a well-formed status quo that is violently imposed and that excludes alternative voices which does not conform to the political discourses provided for the polis to be accepted (and consumed). These excluded bodies are best manifested in Diamela Eltit’s work. From the worn-out bodies of Jamás el fuego nunca, to the characters expelled from the supermarket and the house, the order established in the contemporary polis does not allow any dissidence. Julio Ortega, analyzing Mano de obra, explains that Eltit’s writing it is about resistance:

La obra de Diamela Eltit (a la que Bolaño insiste, defensivamente, en calificar de lectura difícil) le demuestra que se podía vivir y escribir en Chile contra los militares, primero, y a pesar de la transición, después, disputándose a los policías salvajes los nombres de “patria” o “familia”, y al neo-liberalismo los de “política” o “mercado”. (Diamela Eltit, 54)

[Diamela Eltit’s work (which Bolaño defensively insisted in categorize as a difficult reading) demonstrates him that you could live and write in Chile against the military first, and later passing though the transition, disputing over the savage police the names of “land” or “family”, and to neoliberalism the names of “politics” or “market”.]

In that sense, Eltit’s defiance surpasses the limitations of her work with the political decision of staying in Chile.

However, it is in Los vigilantes where the political order is better illustrated. In fact and as I mentioned earlier, it is the father who is at the top of the power structure.

The mother mainly reacts to his law along the novel. That is the reason why she is responding to him through the letters. His power is also the reason why all the neighbors watching her every move respond to him, and why even his mother works as a spy sent of him in the private space of the house. In that sense, both his mother and the neighbors are reflections of the law of the father, which is as oppressive as in a Kafka story.

There are series of implications that are linked to his figure as a father and the role of the novel to challenge the political system. On the one hand, it echoes the figure of

Pinochet. In fact, there is a recurrence of an absence of the father in Chilean’s literature today. Novels like Alejandra Costamagna’s first novel, En voz baja (In a Low Voice), and Andrea Jeftanovic’s Escenarios de guerra (War Sceneries), are motivated by either the death of the father in the first example, or the absence of that character in the second novel. Other writers like Rafael Gumicio portrait powerless mothers that are more like a joke than a powerful figure. However, for Eltit the Father figure is very much present, as it is his law what organizes the neighborhood (polis). That Father figure echoes the discourses that proclaimed the patriotism of military dictatorships as well as the creation of Pinochet’s fatherly figure (Even today he is called “el tata” by his supporters, which means “grampa” in Chile). “Patriotism” in Spanish is a term that refers the nation as the

“homeland” or “fatherland.” The Father figure in Eltit ties all these connections between dictatorship, politics, the modern polis, and the notion of patriotism to unify it. Los vigilantes underlines a continuity between Chile’s past and its’ new democracy, which remains to resemble the dictatorship’s political order. In fact, it can be also argued that the Father is also absent in that novel, multiplying the nets between the novel and the new

Chilean literature. That is the reason why, at the end of the novel, it is not clear the

identity of the mother’s addressee, if she was even writing to the father or not. As a result the son will say at the end of the novel, “Mother never knew whom would get her world.

For whom was her arid and useless word. Oh, mother and her pile of mistakes.” (131)

(“Mamá nunca supo para quién era su palabra. Para quién era su palabra árida e inútil.

Ah, mamá y su acumulación de errores.”) According to the son’s voice, her ignorance of the addressee’s identity is her downfall. It is precisely this lack of identity of the Father what underlines that the polis is working under his law. Even when he is absent, which is also evident by the nonexistence letters from his part, his law functions without him.

Once again there is a parallel between the political system of the dictatorship with the neoliberal system of the new democracy. However, because the law of the Father functions even when he is not present, Los vigilantes establishes another link with the modern polis outside of its fictional representation. In 1994, when the novel was published, the new government (“la Consertación”) only had been in power for four years. However, even with the return of democracy, Pinochet remained leading the

Military Forces, and he was sworn as senator-for-life, which made him immune of prosecution. This means that, as in the novel, the law of the Father (Pinochet) was still influencing the political structure of Chile, stressing out the role of aesthetics as a representation of reality that opens new possibilities of interpretation.

In that sense, it is the mother the one to represent those new possibilities, even when she is expelled of the represented polis at the end of the novel. Her role, which as I have mentioned earlier, echoes the figure of the artist, is the one that challenges the law of the Father from within. As Josefina Ludmer explains talking about Sor Juana Inés de la

Cruz, the weak has to use different ways to defy power without confronting it directly.

This is precisely what the mother does. Her defiance to the Father also echoes a defiance to the public space, which is structured by his figure and which is limited, supported by the notion of a reality that excludes any alternative to the logic of its foundation:

Porque, tú, dime, ¿qué es lo que sueñas? Ah, pero lo sé. Pienso que entre tus sueños y la realidad no media ninguna diferencia. Te aseguro que en las imágenes que se urden en tus noches, tu hijo y yo sólo representamos la escena incandescente y repetida de una inmolación. (97)

[Because you, tell me, what do you dream of? Oh, but I know. I think that there is no difference between your dreams and reality. I am sure that in the images that concoct in your nights, your son and I merely represent the incandescent and repeated scene of immolation.]

Therefore, as the artist, she suggests new possibilities to the political discourse within her limited space, which is the domestic space, that of the house and family.

The definition of the family is also challenged by the figure of the mother. In fact, the fact that she is the one taking care of the son shakes up the notion of the conventional family: father, mother, and son. This is another confrontation to the Law of the Father, who demands a behavior in order to respect the institution of the family even when he is not there. As a result, she is questioned for leaving the domestic space over and over again. At the same time, her final act of helping the unprotected destroys the conventional role of the mother. As she “acts” she becomes immersed in the polis, a role that is limited to the Father and the Father only. In other words, to surpass the domestic space for the mother transforms her into a political figure, which situates her at the place of the Father, challenging his power, therefore, the order of the political sphere.

2.4 Trespassing Frontiers

Pinochet also utilized the family institution as an organizing factor. In fact, the recovery of moral values was among the justifications used to defend the coup against

Allende. Nonetheless, the use of the Family as an imaginary to reshape the nation surpasses the national borders of Chile. In fact, Pinochet used that discourse as an imitation of another dictator, Francisco Franco, who was the authoritarian leader of Spain from 1939 to 1975 and who also used the rhetoric of restoring family values after the

Civil War to overthrow the democratic elected government of the Popular Front. That is precisely the reason why there is a picture of Franco in Jamas el fuego nunca and why is an important point of reference in the novel:

No consigo dormir y entre los minutos, a través de los segundos, que no alcanzo a precisar, se entromete una inquietud absurda pero que se impone como decisiva, la muerte, sí, la muerte de Franco. No consigo recordar cuando murió Franco. Cuándo fue, en que año, en qué mes, bajo cuales circunstancias, me dijiste: murió Franco, finalmente se murió echado como un perro. […] Lo tengo. Tengo también la muerte de Franco, pero no el año, ni el mes ni menos el día. (Jamás 12)

[I don’t get to sleep and in between the minutes, in between the seconds, that I can’t get to specify, interferes an absurd anxiety that decisively imposes itself: the death, yes, the death of Franco. I don’t get to remember when Franco died. When was it, in which year, in which month, under which circumstances, you told me: Franco died, he finally died like an abandoned dog. […] I have it. I also have Franco’s death, but not the year, or the month, even less the day.]

The use of Franco’s figure establishes a transatlantic connection between Chile and

Spain. Actually, the novel’s narrative does not provide for a specific setting, so it could take place in Spain. The reader suspects that these two characters were part of the Left movements in Chile because of Eltit’s nationality. However, because the narrative does not provide a specific location, it opens the possibility of going beyond the specificity of any national context. The role of Franco suggests that it could be Spain, as any other country that lived through a dictatorship and that was somehow linked to Franco and the

Spanish situation.

At the same time, it escapes any temporal situation, reflecting the dynamics of a global word that surrounds the literary manifestations of today. Following the definition of Toby Miller, “globalization stands for a sense from across time, space and nation.”

(Global Hollywood 56). In that sense, Jamás el fuego nunca is already a reflection of a story that aims to be global while, at the same time, being part of the specificity of Chile.

This characteristic of Eltit’s writing is shared with both Sepúlveda and Bolaño. In the case of Historias marginales, all of the stories take place in different locations around the world. Juanpa’s story does takes place in Chile, however the story of the Duarte twins takes place in Uruguay. Even though Telmo Duarte’s fate could have happen in any of the Southern Cone dictatorship, the political incident is a result of the Argentinean regime in Uruguay, instead of a result of Pinochet’s regime. At the same time, Vidal’s story takes place in Ecuador while professor Galves is exiled from Chile to Hamburg after the death of his son. In other words, the stories take place all over the globe. This underlines a connection that it is shared regardless of national frontiers. Marginal stories or those micro-narratives that fight against oblivion are part of our everyday lives in every corner of the world. In that sense, Sepúlveda writes of Chile, but he also writes about the

Southern Cone, Latin America, Europe, and eventually, what every human being shares notwithstanding the place he was born. Sepúlveda uses love, friendship, work, and nature as an icon of the planet we all share.

However, it is in “La isla perdida” where the need to surpass national frontiers is better illustrated. In that story, a group of people from different countries and different languages builds their own community: “We understood each other than to a Babelic salad of Italian, German, Spanish, French and Serbo-Croatian.” (15) (“Nos entendíamos

gracias a una ensalada babélica de italiano, alemán, español, francés y serbocroata.”) All of these lives together form a new polis that, from the island of Mali Losinj (located near the former Yugoslavia), defines its community within their specificities. In other words, it is a common experience and a common home that is formed from the notion of difference. In that sense, the island becomes a new arena to establish a shared project from the heterogeneity of their lives, building a community that defies the unity of language or, better yet, forms a new language from the mélange of different languages.

According to Benedict Anderson, the construction of the national discourse lies in the addition of different people that shares specific characteristics, being the written language (press) the most important one. This characteristic goes hand in hand with homogenous discourses within the modern polis in Los vigilantes and Mano de obra, or the homogeneous discourse of Pinochet in Chile. The island works therefore as a challenge to the dividing discourses of the national. In fact, it is when the Serbo-Croatian war (another political event that serves as a background for the story) takes place that the shared project is dissolved. According to Arendt in her reading of Clausewitz, war is the continuation of politics by other means. (On Violence, 9). In that sense, the war that irrupts in these characters “lives” serves as a violent imposition of the politics of nationalism. The national discourse is transformed from a unifying factor (which builds a community) to an exclusive project that separates the people represented in the community of the story. In that sense, the modern discourse of nationality becomes the

Law of the Father, where any difference is to be silenced and exiled from the polis. War itself becomes an oppressive manifestation of those politics. As a result, the island, is lost forever; “It hurts me loosing the island, and it reminds me that the people that doesn’t

profoundly know their history fall easily to the hands of fraudsters, of false prophets, and they made the same mistakes all over again.” (17) (“Me duele la isla perdida, y me repite que los pueblos que no conocen a fondo su historia caen fácilmente en manos de estafadores, de falsos profetas, y vuelven a cometer los mismos errores”) . The mistake that is repeated in this community – beyond the long a violent history in the region – is the imposition of a political project that imposes its definitions without allowing any alternative view or questioning. In that sense, the island becomes a metaphor of the contemporary space of the polis and how it shapes the life of the people that takes part in it.

The metaphorical allusion of the polis underlines the interchangeability of the national space. In other words, the island serves as an icon of Yugoslavia, but also of

Chile, Germany, Italy and France. This implies a surpassing of the national limitations using a metaphorical representation of the elements that builds a community and the elements that are excluded within that community. In that sense, the metaphor of the island can be applied from the specific situation of Mali Losinj, to the universal problem of a political discourse of nationality that leads more often than not to violent divisions.

Los detectives salvajes is another example of how fictional narrative surpasses the specific problems of Chile and attempt to reflect on an universal reflection of this problematic. In fact, that novel is mostly about Mexico, from a Chilean writer who left

Chile early in his life and wrote the novel in Spain. Nonetheless, the novel mocks the old definitions of cosmopolitanism, which was an ideal shared by the artist of the seventies.

That is the reason why Amadeo Salvatierra remarks the interest of Lima and Belano on the European characters above the local talent:

Y entonces sí que dejé que me arrebataran la revista y con qué gusto vi cómo los dos metían sus cabezas adentro de esas viejas páginas en octavo, la revista de Cesárea, aunque los muy cosmopolitas a lo primero que se fueron fue a las traducciones, a los poemas de Tzara, Breton y Souppault, traducidos respectivamente por Pablito Lezcano, Cesárean Tinajero y Cesárea y un servidor. (271)

[And then I really let them take away my magazine and it was a pleasure see how both of them threw their face into the old octave pages, Cesárea’s magazine, though the big cosmopolitans went first to the section of translations, to the poems of Tzara, Breton, and Souppault, translated respectively by Pablito Lezcano, Cesárean Tinajero, Cesárea and yours truly.]

The mock serves as a critique and the surpassing of the national frontiers that are not limited to Western European countries. In fact, beyond France and Spain, the novel takes place in Israel, Vienna, United States and Nicaragua, afar the central setting of Mexico.

As a result, all of these stories build a community that shares their knowledge of the failed poets, regarding geographical references. In that sense, they echo what Acland considers to be a “global community”, which means a relationship with a changing understanding of the national. In other words, to go global means to achieve a “malleable sense of national identity”, this is also referred as the post-national condition. (12) Los detectives salvajes leaves Chile as a background (as Bolaño himself did) and assumes an identity based on the continual surpass of national frontiers, challenging the notion of national identity that divides people instead of uniting them, as in “La isla perdida”.

CHAPTER 3:

FORCED TO LOOK: A COLLECTIVE IDENTITY IN FILM

…the alleged unrepresentability of extermination does not mean that fiction cannot be used to confront its atrocious reality. -Jaques Rancière

El cine político es un cine del presente, incluso cuando hable del pasado. Y si el cine es un arte del presente, como se ha repetido hasta la saciedad, el cine político lo es doblemente, como elevado al cuadrado: una vez, por decirlo así, metafísicamente, y otra por su relación con el público, con la realidad histórica que se recibe. –Christian Zimmer

…movies are mentors and metaphors for all our lives and maybe even for our politics. -James Combs

In a relatively new cinematographic industry in Chile, Fernando Lavanderos’s independent film Y las vacas vuelan (Cows Also Fly, 2004) attempts an artistic representation of Chile. The present Chilean society is represented and filmed in Chile, a

country that is in midst of its democratic transition. This is certainly new not only for the theme of the film, but especially for the way in which Y las vacas vuelan is conceived. In terms of narrative structure, the film mixes the documentary composition with fiction, or better yet, is a fictional film which narrative posses as a documentary about how the

Chilean film is been filmed, an echo of classics films like Federico Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo

(1963) or recent attempts like the metafictional documentary Lost in la Mancha, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (2002). The plot revolves around Max (Maximiliano

Cabrero), a foreigner in Chile who, while filming, begins to be filmed by himself. In that sense, the movie raises the question of who films in Chile. It also raises the question of what are we supposed to see through the images of a constant eye (the lens) inserted in

Chilean everyday lives, and finally, how we rebuild a nation through the camera itself.

The opening sequence of Y las vacas vuelan sets-up the film with a series of images about casual people hanging out in a park and different shots of Santiago de

Chile’s ordinary houses. While the camera focuses on the houses, director Fernando

Lavanderos uses a voice-over of María (María Paz Ercilla) that sets the undertone of the film while leading up to the main theme:

MARÍA (V.O.): Es una cuestión social […] Es una cuestión de pertenecer a una cultura. MAX: ¿Ah sí? ¿Y qué es? MARÍA: Son […] diferencias que uno tiene que admitir porque si no la otra persona no puede llegar a entenderlo.

[MARÍA (V.O.): It’s a social concern […] It questions belonging to a certain culture. MAX: Oh yeah? And what does that mean? MARÍA:

They are […] differences that one needs to admit because if not, the other person may not understand it.]

The sequence establishes the direction the film is going to take, an in-and-out approach of the limits between the notion of reality and fiction. The viewer gets to see Max watching the film of María inside of his room while thinking about the creation process. It also sets an identical pattern in terms of the macro-universe (society, culture) versus the micro- universe (María, Max, the “documentary” film). As a result, the independent film presents an uneven representation of contemporary Chile. By filming about a foreign director in Chile, the notion of nationality and who belongs to it is questioned.

Furthermore, nationality is linked to the film as also being an artificial construction.

Bigger productions and institutionalized directors are less subtle in terms of reflecting on and representing the nation. That is the case with Andrés Wood, one of the new directors in the Chilean Film Industry. While Wood has filmed about contemporary

Chile and their myths within fiction,22 in Machuca (2004) he suggests that, in order to understand what led the country to its present (portrayed in Y las vacas vuelan); it is important to first understand the days leading up to the coup of Augusto Pinochet on

September 11, 1973, and its political implications. As such, Wood chooses to set the political turmoil of those years as a background. Following the narrative model of Louis

Malle’s Au Revoir les Enfants (1987), Machuca focuses on the charismatic “coming of age” story of Gonzalo Infante (Matías Quer), a high-class kid that becomes friends with

22 Wood’s break-through film as Historias del fútbol (1997), where he builds different stories related to soccer, the most important sport in the Southern Cone. The plot of El desquite (1999), his next film, places its narrative in the nineteen century, critiquing the fervent adoration to the land-owners and Chilean high class.

Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna). Pedro, a kid from a slum nearby Saint Patrick School where Gonzalo studies, meets the wealthy boy in his school. The acceptance of a group of poor kids in the privileged and private school was part of the government’s attempts to give equal opportunities to children of different social classes, following the Marxist doctrine embraced by President Salvador Allende.

The relationship between Gonzalo and Machuca is not easy due to their social differences. The film shows the constant frictions between the boys. In fact, it is difficult for Gonzalo to approach Machuca at the beginning of the film, when the new students are introduced to the private school. For Gonzalo, Machuca and their friends are part of a world he does not know and, as a result, fears. Their moment of bonding comes after

Gonzalo is forced to hit Machuca, which he refuses to do and costs him been hit by a rock. In other words, their friendship is built as a result of the violence and aggression stemming from the clash of different social classes, which remains to be hardly defined in

Chile. The constant friction will also be a part of their relationship. The film shows the

Infantes’ indifference for the poor, and Machuca and his friend Silvana’s resentment toward Gonzalo for his social privilege. The oppositional forces reach their climax at the moment of the coup, where Pinochet’s military force is used to violently erase the world of Machuca (associated with Salvador Allende and the socialist movement). As such, the film revises history within fictional narrative while presenting a story that aims to a broader audience raising questions about the possible awareness that a coming of age story can create.23

23 Stinne Krog Poulsen defines the film as a childhood film. According to her, a childhood film (and she analyzes Machuca as one) differentiates itself from a children film because of the content. While

Pablo Larraín follows Wood’s example in his films, though his representation of

Chile (past and present) is far darker than Wood’s films. Fuga (2006), his first film, captures the romantic figure of the artist in order to build a complex metaphor of Chile.

Edited with a series of sequences from two different times, the plot involves musician

Eliseo Montalván (Benjamín Vicuña), who is motivated to present a symphony that exists only in his head. The music is inspired by a traumatic incident in his childhood when he witnessed the rape and murder of his older sister over a piano. As a result, Eliseo nurtures a link between music and violence where the former serves as an escape vault for his pain. However, the link between violence and music is reinforced once his opus magna is premiered. After an enormous effort from his pianist and lover Georgina (Francisca

Imboden) in performing the central part of the symphony, she drops dead on her piano, right in the middle of the symphony.

The crucial moment of Georgina’s death is the crucial moment tying Eliseo’s story with the second plot of the film and the co-protagonist: Ricardo Coppa (Gastón

Pauls), an untalented Argentine musician who witnessed that concert and found the original musical sheet of the symphony in the black market. He is so obsessed with that concert that convinces a group of musicians to help him find Eliseo, who disappeared from public life after the traumatic concert. Ricardo wants to perform the complete symphony. Ricardo finds the psychiatric hospital where Eliseo was sent after the concert, and where the walls of the room served as an instrument of externalization for Eliseo. He

the former identifies itself as being a target group type of movie, childhood films are films “that evolves around the concept of memory” (History, Memory and Nostalgia 2), always relating to a nostalgic past while evolving through the eyes of a main character child or teenager. Hence, because it is also a relationship with the struggles of growing up, the film connects with a younger audience too and not just to adults who grew up during that historic period of time.

wrote most of the music of his symphony in those walls, a music sheet that Ricardo will try to put together on his own. He eventually finds Eliseo, who escaped the hospital and ended up helping a fisherman in Valparaíso. Ricardo’s obsession to finish the symphony with Eliseo’s help leads to the movie’s resolution, when, in an attempt to play the rest of the symphony in the piano – which also leads to a struggle of violence and a fight between Ricardo his musicians – the original composer is dragged to the bottom of the ocean along with the musical instrument.

Post-mortem, (2010) on the other hand, places the narrative within the last days of the government of Salvador Allende, the social and political turmoil of Chile during

1973, and the results of the military regime. At it happens in Machuca, the last days of

Allende’s government are represented as a background to the main plot. Mario (Alfredo

Castro) works as a recording office of a morgue. Familiarized with death, after studying and watching corpses for a living, he seems sentimentally detached in his work, as he only records numbers and medical descriptions of the morgue’s medical staff. However, his detachment goes further than his place of work, as he seems socially unfitted to interact. The character is not concerned with politics or the social reality (about to burst) of the nation. His only obsession is that of watching and secretly loving her neighbor

Nancy (Antonia Zegers). In fact, none of the violence used by the dictatorship, which is portrayed in the second half of the movie (its most dramatic effect is the pile of bodies growing up at the morgue), seems to affect Mario, contrasting in that way with the attitude of his co-worker Sandra, (Amparo Noguera), who sympathized with Allende. His disconnection is underlined once he finds Nancy hiding in the backyard of her house. He agrees to hide her and take care of her only because he hopes that she will become his

girlfriend, with no consideration for her political compromises or for the fact that her family has been disappeared because of their political activism. The movie ends after he discovers that Nancy is hiding with her lover. Mario proceeds to cover their hideout with lots of stuff, suggesting that he will let them to rot in there.

Post Mortem is not the first movie starring Alfredo Castro as an alienated character in a film directed by Pablo Larraín. In fact, on the director’s previous film, Tony

Manero (2008), Castro stars as an alienated character obsessed with being “Chile’s Tony

Manero”; the character popularized by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever (1977).

Raúl (Alfredo Castro) works as a dancer in a little cabaret in Santiago, where his obsession draws him to fix the cabaret in order to resemble a disco-dance floor. Aside from perfecting Travolta’s character, Raúl is completely detached from the every day life in Chile: he is not interested in sex, in love, in the feelings of those he hurts, or in life. In fact, he murders four characters in order to complete the transformation of the cabaret. He also fails to intervene with the government agents who come to the cabaret searching for the “subversive material” against Pinochet that Goyo (Héctor Morales) and Paulina

(Paola Lattus) were secretly distributing. The movie suggests that they will pay with death, the same as it was shown in the middle of the film with the assassination of a

“subversive” that was also distributing propaganda against Pinochet. However, the death of his colleges is of no consequence to Raúl, who manages to escape the cabaret to run to a TV show in search of the “Chilean Tony Manero”. The climax of the film is actually the whole sequence of Saturday Night Fever, gracefully interpreted by Raúl, who manages to win a close second position in the contest. The final scene puts him on a bus

after the contests result, following the actual winner and his female companion and suggesting the murder of both characters by Raúl.

Mi mejor enemigo (2005) also places its narrative in the past, specifically in the years of Pinochet’s regime and the conflict with Argentina in 1977, when, over a dispute of the sovereignty of some islands in the south of both nations (Tierra de fuego), they almost went to war. The film is narrated by Rodrigo Rojas (Nicolás Saavedra), a Chilean conscript that ends up in a retinue in charge of searching the frontier between the two countries. However, the soldiers break their only compass as the result of an accident and they get lost. As nobody knows where they are and with fear that they enter Argentina, an action which could be interpreted as an invasion, the retinue is asked to build a trench and stay put wherever they are. Soon enough the soldiers find out that they are not alone and that a group of Argentine soldiers are within a few steps of each other. At that moment, the film, which borrows more from the comedy genre than drama, becomes a story about the tensions between the two groups, the things that unite them as national neighbors

(like the passion for soccer), the suspicion of each other, and the threat of a war that never happens. In fact, the film reaches its climax at the moment where there is information about the impending aid of forces by the Argentine side. However, right at the last minute, they retreat, as both countries settle aside their differences. As the

Argentine lieutenant is advancing toward the Chilean side to return the letters they previously gave them in case of death, a confused soldier fires a bullet that hits him, causing a start of fire from both sides and the death of “El Chilote” (Andrés Olea), from the Chilean side.

The film ends up with the group of Chilean soldiers returning with Rodrigo to

Santiago as they toast in honor of their dead friend:

RODRIGO (V.O.): […] el ultimo saludo del Chilote. Único héroe de una guerra sin victoria. Único héroe de una guerra que no fue.

[RODRIGO (V.O.): […] the last toast for Chilote. The only hero of a war without history. The only hero of a war that never was.]

As such, the Voice-Over wraps-up the imaginary tensions brought by the imaginary frontier.

3.1 The Artist Within (The Polis)

The most important argument behind the narrative of Y las vacas vuelan is the creative process of filming Chile from the perspective of a foreigner. This immediately suggests that the act of representing a collective imaginary (Chile) requires isolation – a stepping back – for understanding the heterogeneous elements that assemble a society.

The camera works in that way as a tool to complete that stepping back. In that sense, the narrative presents the actor as the director of a documentary where the presence of the director (played by the actor) is not present. Thus, when Max is explaining to María how the documentary is going to work, he stresses the importance of his invisibility:

MAX: […] El sí. Atrás de la cámara. El nunca aparece como él. Siempre detrás de la cámara.

[MAX: […] He is there. Behind the camera. Thought he never appears as himself. He is always behind the camera.]

On the one hand, the camera works then as a mantle to disguise or hide the actor

(as he should not be present). The hidden actor builds parallels between Max and

Lavanderos, who is really the man behind the camera. In fact, Lavanderos is never shown in the film, as Max suggests about himself in his movie within the movie. At the same time, Max plays the role of a director trying to make (and hide in) a film that is a mix between documentary and fiction (or a fiction that pretends to camouflage as a documentary), only to reveal at the end that he was an actor pretending to be a director for Fernando Lavanderos.

The metafictional connections are not merely a witty trick of the film to be more sophisticated. The acting-out of a blend between the fictional and documentary genres stress the importance on the artificiality, as there is no documentary capable of capturing

“reality” (or Chile in this film) behind the camera. The mere presence of the camera signifies an artificial representation of what is understood as reality. At the same time, the insistence of placing the actor-director behind the camera stresses the importance of the technical apparatus. This pointing out of the artificial nature of the film insists on renouncing any claim of total truth. Art is about a subjective interpretation and understanding Chile through art will be an exercise towards that direction.

The relationship between camera and film is linked with the beginning of the film and that “belonging to a certain culture”. In other words, it goes back to the main topic of filming Chile, today, from the eyes of an outsider. As the camera takes the place of a foreigner – the one that “sees” – the object “to-be-seen” takes the place of the film, in other words, Chileans. In that sense, the series of takes based on people walking alongside the streets of Santiago, which posses as non-fictional Chile are just another component of the film. Thus, this society that is filmed, the contemporary polis, is also an artificial construction. The polis is part of aesthetics and, to understand it, to think of

aesthetics, or film in this case, becomes of great importance. This does not mean that is not possible to think about a specific community without aesthetics, but that in a fractured society postmodern aesthetics and its insistence on fragmentation plays an important role for understanding a collective imaginary. The importance of a low-budget film like Y las vacas vuelan, even with its limited circulation, is precisely that multilayer narrative that most of the time seems to go nowhere. The film within the film, the tension between what is real and what is not real, the conflicts with María, and the director turned into actor (and vice versa), are then metanarrative elements that analyze the fragmented society in its attempt to be represented in the film.

That fragmentation is best underlined by the figure of the director turned into actor at the end of the film, as I mentioned earlier. In fact, the climax of the film comes precisely at that moment where actor and director blend into one figure.

The director, which was already a detached figure hiding behind technology, not only represents the fragmented polis with the use of metafiction, but also becomes a multilayered symbol within the film. He becomes an icon of the film while taking that place behind the camera that was reserved to Max until then, that is, the place behind the camera that Max was simulating to take along the narrative of the film. As he enters fill this space, Lavanderos becomes both director and absent actor (the one always behind the camera). In that sense, he gains more than one identity in the film.

At the same time, he erases the face of the actor when he takes the place that was assigned for the actor before (that of the film maker). In other words, Max is displaced of his role. The film ends therefore with a final sequence of the actor walking all dressed-up in the middle of Santiago. The “face” of the actor is covered with a mask. As he is denied

of his role and face, the actor becomes just a symbol of the figure of the artist, which is at the same time the symbolic icon of the fragmented society he is part of. The result is a final sequence where the faceless actor seems to be doing a parodic mimic while walking through the streets. Lavanderos films the natural reaction of different people in the street while Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” is played as a background, a piece of music related to sublime beauty.

The displacement of the artist figure, which as I have mentioned earlier takes an important role in Y las vacas vuelan, is also what sets in motion the narrative in Fuga. As both Lavanderos and Max, the role of Eliseo is that of the artist as an outsider in its own community. In Fuga, the young artist is not a foreigner as in Y las vacas vuelan, but, he ends up “disappearing” in a mental institution:

ELISEO: Siempre he estado en lugares de los cuales no se puede escapar. Mis padres gastaron una fortuna en volverme loco. Y aquí voy, a ver si me salvo de mí mismo.

[ELISEO: I’ve always been in places from which there is no escape. My parents spent a fortune in driving me mad. And here I am, seeing if I can save me from myself.]

Eliseo’s detachment in underlined with that rupture from the norm, in other words, the

“un-sanity”, where the definition of “sane” implies a normal social role as understood by the polis. His rupture comes as a result of art, in this case, music. In fact, the promotional poster announces, “music is the only escape” (“la música es la única salida”), which, as music is considered to be an aesthetical expression, implies that art is the mean to escape.

There are a series of escapes all along the narrative, beginning with the use of music as an escape from the traumatic murder of her sister. Music is also the escape from life, as it becomes what eventually destroys Eliseo. However, it is an escape necessary in

order to use art as a mean to understand the polis, which is from what he is escaping. That is the reason why at the beginning of Ricardo’s search for Eliseo, he meets his doctor

Klaus Roth (Héctor Noguera), who uses music as the “deus-ex-machina” for the latter’s insanity:

RICARDO: ¿Qué fue lo que le volvió loco? KLAUS ¿Usted es músico? RICARDO Sí. KLAUS Usted lo sabrá entonces.

[RICARDO: What made him crazy? KLAUS: Are you a musician? RICARDO: Yes. KLAUS: You’ll know it, then.]

Eliseo’s madness is then a method to underline a disconnection between art and artist with the rest of society. Madness has been associated with displaced individuals since romanticism. However, Foucault explains the relation between the insane and a perceived threat to the established political order defined by the State as norm.24 In that sense,

Eliseo inherits disruptive elements that empower him as the worn-out and challenging figure of the “mad artist”. Larraín uses this scapegoat figure to establish a link with the romantic trait identified with the idea of genius. One of the most crucial scenes in tying the idea of art and genius is precisely when Eliseo meets Claudio (Alfredo Castro) in the

24 The study of the clinic and the concept of madness is the central issue at hand in Madness and civilization: A Story of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.

psychiatric hospital, a gay patient from a lower social class than Eliseo’s family. In that sequence, the notion of artist (this particular artist portrayed by Larraín) is expressed through Claudio’s attempt to talk to Eliseo:

CLAUDIO: Dicen que voi soi hipersensible, que soi un genio, una especie de Wagner. Lo que pasa es que usted es igual que yo que soy terrible. ¿Sabe? Yo veo el tiempo en la tele y me pongo a llorar. Suena el teléfono y me da un ataque de nervios. Así somos los artistas.

[CLAUDIO: They say you are hypersensitive, that you are a genius, some sort of Wagner. The thing is, you are just like me. I’m terrible. You know? I watch the weather on TV and I start to cry. Phone rings and I get a nervous breakdown. That’s how we artist are…]

Artist and genius go hand in hand with a hyper-sensibility that is part of the artist’s

“nature”. Genius is effortless; it is natural, which means that is both natural while defying a natural order. Jacques Rancière expands on this relationship between artist and the notion of genius:

Genius is the active power of nature, opposed to any norm, which is its own norm. But a genius is also someone who does not know what he is doing or how he does it. What is deduced from this in Schelling and Hegel is a conceptualization of art as the unity of a conscious process and an unconscious process. The aesthetic revolution establishes this identity of knowledge and ignorance, acting and suffering, as the very definition of art. (Dissensus, 119)

Eliseo is a genius in the sense that, even when he discovers the dangers of his art (and his potential), he is not sure where does it come from and how to respond to it. The music is basically playing in his head as the result of the unconscious.

However, music is what gives Eliseo a sense of order, a perception of reality. On the other hand, this reality is chaotic and it is what leads him to reclusion and, eventually, to his death in the middle of the Pacific. This duality, which is a character by itself within the narrative, is underlined in the basic definition of music. In fact, George Steiner

defines music as an “interrupted silence”, and its language, based in a dialogue with silence itself, is formalized with the use of intervals and pauses within the music intervals, all within notes, chords and movements (Gramáticas de la creación, 136-8). In

Fuga, music is not only the interruption of silence, but silence and music are tied together:

CARLITOS: Todo es música compadre. Hasta el más absoluto silencio es capaz de contener una nota perfecta.

[CARLITOS: Everything is music man. Even the most absolute silence is capable of containing the most perfect note.]

As such, the use of music and the importance of its silences work in the film as a symbol of art itself. Its importance is that of provoking new questions, or better yet, it underlines the lack of answers. That is how the genius, who “does not know what he is doing”, regains his agency. His embrace of silence implies a defiance to an order which ends up denying him a space within the polis, therefore, getting displaced from it. This is the space of de-negotiation, where the artist’s capacity of action and defiance to the political order comes as a result of a social displacement. He is inserted within the polis and challenges its normality by being erased from it, like Max in the final scene of Y las vacas vuelan.

Moreover, Fuga insists that, if the artist figure symbolizes a challenge to normality, it has to be an ongoing process or an unfinished question without an answer.

That is why in Fuga, the double of Eliseo is Ricardo, the musician trying to finish a work from Eliseo’s past that refuses to be completed. Ricardo’s attempt, however, stresses-out his difference with Eliseo. That is why when the musicians are trying to play the piece

originally composed by the latter without knowing it, they express the dissonance of both characters:

MACARENA: Es raro, es como si hubieran dos manos metidas en esta música […] ¿Estás seguro que tú la escribiste? Porque si es así, tiene doble personalidad.

[MACARENA: It’s weird, it’s as there were two people involved in this music […] Are you sure it you wrote it? Because if that’s the case, you have a double personality.]

In that sense, Ricardo becomes an interpreter (reader) of Eliseo. Ricardo is the symbol of postmodernist revisionism; in this case, the “reading” exercise focuses on the idea of the

“genius”, inherited from the romantic and modern movements. Larraín explores therefore that art and artist are based on their interpretations. In fact, when Claudio sits in front of the piano he diminishes the importance of musical and the horror that the piano caused in

Eliseo:

CLAUDIO: Esta guevá es una caja con cuerdas cariño. La música vale cayamba.

[CLAUDIO: This thing is a fucking box with strings, sweetheart. Music is worth shit.]

Art is therefore a mere construction based on how we use the musical instrument and give meaning to its notes. Without interpretation (reading), art is nothing but excrement, nothing of real value.

Aesthetics are linked by its interpretation, which means that it incarnates a plurality of meanings for each aesthetical expression. As a result, the aesthetical work cannot be finished in Fuga — it has to be silenced. The end of a work is a façade for an answer, which will also end the creative possibilities, therefore ending art. In Larrain’s

film, to finish the piece of music implies destruction, which is why the movie ends with artist and piano in the middle of the sea.

3.2 Art and Trauma: From the Individual to the Collective

…the alleged unrepresentability of extermination does not mean that fiction cannot be used to confront its atrocious reality. -Jaques Rancière

The ending of Eliseo is to be predicted when piano and violence have been tied since the beginning of the musician’s career. In fact, there is a direct relation between death and art in Fuga. Eliseo’s melody begins to develop in the same piano that her sister was brutally raped and murdered. The sequence of Eliseo’s first notes portrait a close-up of his fingers (as a kid) pressing the keyboards filled with blood. That’s the start of his never-to-be-completed masterpiece.

Artistic expression is therefore linked to a traumatic event. At this point, the film becomes a symbol of the political realities of Chile and it opens the discussion of

Larraín’s film as a response to the Chilean political strata. Eliseo’s traumatic experience is a micro-narrative that expands to the macro-narrative of the Chilean polis. In other words, Fuga goes from the subjective story of Eliseo to the collective history of his community. Chilean society remains to endure the consequences of the collective trauma of September 11, 1973. That historic date marked a violent irruption in the way Chile was constituted, when, for the first time in continental American history, the military, not only overthrew a democratically elected government, but also destroyed the national symbol of the executive power, “la Casa de la Moneda”. Today, Chile and the rest of the world are still haunted by the images of fire, bombs, jets and smoke in the presidential palace,

as well as the demise of a legal president. In that sense, the murder of Eliseo’s sister is a mirror of September 11, 1973. Both incidents are a violent irruption of the natural state of things or a traumatic shock, to use Naomi Klein’s term, which aims to transform the person. On the one hand, there is an external shock brought by another human being and linked together with the piano in Eliseo’s case. On the other hand, there was an external shock applied to impose a political agenda through violence.

The trauma or moment of shock brings as a result the political resonances of Chile as a narrative’s context. The traumatic moment is used as a venue to explore the political context of contemporary Chile and it is the way in which Fuga interacts with the Chile of today. In that sense, we got Eliseo’s father working as a politician of an unnamed political party. In fact, his main interest in keeping Eliseo on the clinic is to hide him from the public eye, which is a subtle parallel with the actions of the dictatorship and the disappeared. One can argue that this character’s role in contemporary politics is vague enough to assume it is a direct critique of the political strata in Chile. We cannot ignore the fact that Fuga was released in 2006, where the ambivalence of the “concertación”

(Concertación de Partidos por la Democracia) government remained in power, a government that was supposed to rescue the democratic order but that refused to judge

Pinochet and the military actors of the dictatorship, a government that also followed the neoliberal model imposed by the General and that failed to prosecute him.

However, Fuga does make a direct political critique with the character of Claudio.

In fact, his monologue, which is the sequence preceding the piano-scene, it is of crucial importance. Larraín takes his time to present it, making a slow transition from a medium shot to a close-up in order to stress the importance of Claudio’s words:

CLAUDIO: Yo he perdido más hermanos de lo que voi hai soñao tener. He pasado mi vida gritando como una fiera, agarrando cuchillos con la lú’ apagá. Yo nací así cariño, con una alita rota y me caí, tantas veces me caí, que me encerraron aquí, y me cagaron, me cagaron. Me cagaron por loca, por comunista, por pilla y buena moza.

[CLAUDIO: I’ve lost more brothers that you could even begin to imagine. I’ve spent my life screaming like a wild beast, catching knives in the dark. I was born like this, sweetie, with a broken wing, and I fell. So many times I fell that they locked me up in here, and they screwed me, they screwed me over. They screwed me for being a fag, a communist, thief and beautiful.]

After this monologue Claudio is underlined as a symbol of the marginalized. He is a minority within minorities; not only for being queer, but also for his militancy in the communist movement, which the government targeted. In effect, his accent situates him as having limited means or underprivileged, who identified themselves with the communist movement and the efforts of UP. As a result he has to be the taken away, cleansed with the medicine of the asylum where anyone that diverts from the “norm has to be hidden. The logic is simple, those that do not belong to society need to be disappeared from the public eye. It is the same reasoning that used Pinochet to anyone who did not conform to his vision. The general even used to treat political dissidence as a form of sickness, and communism was nothing but a cancer that needed to be taken out.

In that sense, Claudio’s statement is a critical moment in Fuga, establishing a connection between fiction and the political reality of Chile, a reality still marked by trauma, therefore, insisting on that moment in the past that shapes the presence in Chilean society.

3.3 In & Out: A Blast from the Past as Seen from a Child’s Eyes

But there was something strange about this war. It had only one side. -Naomi Klein

The echoes of the past in Fuga insist on the postmodern fascination of re-telling history from a multiplicity of voices, creating a link with Andrés Wood’s Machuca. In fact, re-telling history from a “subjective” point of view (that of a child, an alter-ego of

Wood) is the main purpose of his film. In that sense, the echoes of the past are represented both in the coming of age story as well as in the fictional re-creation of

Santiago in 1973. In other words, these two representations demonstrate how Machuca deals with the cracks and fragmentations of what we define as identity, both collective and individual.

On the individual level, we got Gonzalo’s self-awareness as the son of an upper middle class family, therefore part of a social group that were (are) mostly in opposition with Allende’s government. As a result, he enjoys a series of privileges that detach him from the political reality of anything beyond the walls of his school and the private situation of his family. His only concerns respond to the ones of a child from that specific social situation. He, as well as most of the wealthy kids at Saint Patrick’s School, takes for granted the abundance of food, clothes, and sneakers he is able to enjoy, while the rest of society suffers a shortage of everything. Gonzalo is even able to reject (or at least pretends as he does not care about) the Special Editions of the Lone Ranger, which

Roberto Ochagavía (Federico Luppi), lover of María Luisa (Aline Küppenheim) and who is Gonzalo’s mother, uses to bribe him in exchange for his silence. In that sense, his

awareness remains to be “innocent”, even when he feels uneasy with the role he has to play in his mother’s affair.

Gonzalo’s father, Patricio Infante, who seems to be more open to the socialist experiment of Allende, thinks that the socialist experiment may be good for Chile but not necessarily for his family. His daughter is dating Pablo (Tiago Correa) on the other hand, a member of the Nationalist Front (a far right political party in direct opposition to the

UP) who feels entitled to threat and look down people from the lower class (he refers to them as those people). In fact, Gonzalo’s sister only seems to be concerned with Neil

Diamond, party, sex and alcohol. Her only political comment comes as a response to her father saying: “this can’t keep going” (“esto no puede serguir así”), to which she emphatically responds: “no, no it cannot” (“no, no puede seguir así”). However, Patricio was criticizing the fact that his wife was bringing yet another box of extra supplies

(which, she argued, came from the black market when in fact were gifts from Roberto), while their daughter seems to be responding to the political situation of Chile and the shortage of food all around the country.

Nonetheless the most problematic character is María Luisa. Not only she is having an extra marital affair, but she is also only concerned with social standards and consumption. Her relationship with an older man responds to his economical prowess, her circle of friends are only concerned with a high-class etiquette, and her only political intervention is in favor of the nationalists, not in response of any political concern, but because her friends are nationalists. In fact, that sequence is the first of two where María

Luisa is revealed to think of herself as different from “the people” (el pueblo) because of her social position. While her friends are with casseroles in the manifestations of the

nationalists, María Luisa is shown more concerned with how she looks that with any political manifestation. Wood films Küppenheim’s character from behind the mirror she uses to put more make-up on herself. After she is pressured to make some noise with the casserole and gets half of her body through the window, the director cuts to a Long-Shot of the car from an over-the-shoulder front angle, revealing the character dressed as

Jacqueline Kennedy (when Kennedy was shot). The picture of a woman dressed as one of the most important women fashion-wise of the time, with a casserole and in the middle of a political manifestation attests, not only Wood’s sense of humor, but also the complete alienation of this character with the political atmosphere of her country. This alienation, however, is in complete contrast with that of the artist in Fuga because her presence there responds to her desire of posing-up for her high-class friends. It is a political presence only on the surface, for her to keep a good relation with these “powerful” people. There is no intention of a political response whatsoever.

That precise sequence ends with her confrontation with Silvana, where a heated confrontation with Pablo for not paying the cigarettes turns into a fight with María

Luisa’s friends. As she tries to defend Silvana, María Luisa hits Silvana with her purse.

The hit makes Gonzalo’s mother lose her temper and get into the fight with a majority of insults that implied that Silvana return to her “low-class” neighborhood.25 As such, María

Luisa is not interested in any political action, but she will defend her role as a member of the privileged social class.

25 María Luisa uses the word “población”, which have a derogatory meaning in terms of a low- class neighborhood. The term is short for “población callampa”, which literally meant mushrooms neighborhood, as they appear overnight and spread. Another term used is “la pobla”, which are the equivalent of “favelas” in Brazil and “villas” in Chile.

The second sequence that underlines the character’s psychology is her intervention in the Church. When people are reunited to discuss the situation of the school and there are voices of concern with the project of equal education, her position is to detach herself from the poorer people (an echo of those people), most to Patricio’s and

Gonzalo’s shame:

MARÍA LUISA: Yo quiero hacer una pregunta […] ¿Cuál es la idea de mezclar las peras con las manzanas? […] No digo que seamos mejores o peores pero pucha que somos distintos.

[MARÍA LUISA: I just want to ask […] What’s the idea on mixing pears with apples? […] I’m not saying we’re better or worse but shit, we are different!]

Her intervention in one fundamental scene prior to the coup is critical, not only to stress- out her detachment, but Gonzalo’s as well. He might want for her mother to be silent in the name of his friendship with Machuca, but the divisions of class imposed in Chile will overshadow his intention and separate him once again from his friend (a behavior he will copy in his final moment with Peter Machuca). Gonzalo is as detached as his mother, weather he wants it or not.

This detachment, once again, is both the result of the situation of his family as well as of his young age. His life as an upper-middle class student is simple before he meets Machuca. Taking the first scene as a point of departure, what seems to be as simple as getting dress for an ordinary day, defines Gonzalo’s character. All his routine is synchronized, timed, and learned by heart.

However, each person turns political once he has to interact outside his persona.

As a part of a community or the contemporary polis, you are political whether you want it or not. As such Gonzalo’s “isolation” of that first sequence will eventually be

transformed into a political awareness that leads him to return a blank exam under the military-controlled school as a sign of protest as well as his guilt in the film’s ending. In other words, and as I mentioned earlier, there is an interaction right from the beginning between the individual (Gonzalo) and the collective (September, 1973). Wood stresses out this interaction between Gonzalo and the collective using different cinematographic elements that illustrate the interaction between character and polis.

As a result the opening sequence includes a musical motif that is repeated along the film each time Gonzalo learns something new about himself. The motive consists of a simple arrangement that complicates itself during its development. It seems simple while it consists of a variety of sub-themes underneath the main melody. The music starts with the sound of an oboe solo playing while Gonzalo dresses himself. It is one solely tune, which provides for a solitary act that concludes on his image in the mirror after a failed attempt to smile.

The images that go along the music deconstruct Gonzalo while he dresses (in a series of cuts), focusing mostly on the color white. Thus, Gonzalo’s white briefs are shown as a sign of innocence and childhood. However, the oboe joins a cello right when

Wood cuts to the shoes and some unorganized clothes that are lying on the floor. The use of this combination hints already to a complexity that lays on the whole idea of building one’s perception of the self. There is fragmentation and chaos even in his room. The boy tries to put some order (the act of getting dressed), but the scene develops from that pile of clothing. In other words, that first sequence sets the shape of the film, from simple to complicated, from the individual to the collective, from the private to the outside world.

In fact, his early ritual, which ends with his reflection on the mirror, prepares him for that

outside world. His identity will be completed once he intersects with the outside world.

Gonzalo is prepares himself for that outside world. His identity is only possible when he goes from his reflection on the mirror to the interaction with the outside world.

The outside world or public space is shown right from the preceding captions that announce the where and when: Santiago, 1973. It is from that historical reference that the visual images move on to different frames of Gonzalo, Close-Ups of different part of his body while he continues to get dress, moving thus from the collective community (that of the nation) to Gonzalo (the private), and then back to the polis represented in the voice of the radio announcer telling the news. Radio works then as a catalyst that connects the viewer with Gonzalo’s context. Media is used as the link to a collective identity.

The insertion of Gonzalo’s story in 1973 makes of Machuca another film responding to the political results that underlines a collective trauma that resists being forgotten. Therefore Gonzalo gets out of his room to face a fragmented world, a fragmented nation whose tension will be rising until the film’s resolution when “order” and homogeneity is brought by force.

The tension within Chile serves as an antagonist to the coming of age story. The audience is constantly being reminded of the tumultuous context that lies behind Gonzalo and Machuca. Wood pictures then a series of underlying images that work as political commentaries of the time. According to Stinne Krough Poulsen in her article “History,

Memory and Nostalgia in Childhood Films”, there are many shots revealing the constant tension between those who favored the government and the opposition. Hence, we are being bombarded by tableaus of contrasting images, ripped posters and so on, forming a unity which, again, it is hold together by its fragmentation. All of these images lying

underneath the story are the result of a camera wandering off Gonzalo’s story and relationship with Machuca. The camera underscores the sense of a chaotic world that needs to be focused on, borrowing from Alfonso Cuarón, whose work is defined by the use of camera shots that work as a political spectator while broadening the political context within the plot.26 In the case of Machuca, Poulsen mentions for example the use of a wall – shown three times – as a symbolic icon, which is a leitmotif of the raising social tension along the movie. In the beginning of the film, the wall shows the words

“No to Civil War!” (“¡No a la Guerra civil!”). When tensions are rising up and the audience gets near the date of the coup, the wall is shown again, but the “No” has been taken out of the equation, saying: “To Civil War!” (“¡A la Guerra civil!”). After the coup the viewer can see the recurrent image of the wall, which it has been painted all in white, thus, erasing the previous messages. That all white wall reflects the new order after the coup: a world where discipline, uniformity and one main and sole discourse – dictated by the political regime – are the ones that will define Chile as a nation.

The rising tensions within a fragmented polis are portrayed explicitly in the church sequence. Father McEnroe, the leader of social changes in the school, convokes most of the parents to express their concerns about the school, and it all ends up in a heated discussion between those who favor the social changes, those who oppose it, and those who are in the middle like María Luisa. The discussion leads to an intervention of

Machuca’s mother (Tamara Acosta), which stresses the helplessness of her situation and the resistance of those in a higher social class:

26 Y tu mama también (2001) and Children of Men (2006) are the best examples of the use of this technique by Cuarón.

100

JUANA: Cuando yo era niña vivía en un fundo allá cerca de San Nicolás. Mi padre era uno de los inquilinos que cuidaba el ganado. Cuando le pasaba algo a un animal, lo descontaban de los víveres que nos daban a fin de mes. No importaba la razón de la pérdida. El culpable siempre era mi padre. Yo me vine así a Santiago a los quince porque no quería que mis hijos fueran los culpables de todo siempre. Pero parece que aquí en la ciudad es igual, los culpables siempre somos los mismos. Así es como tiene que ser. Y a ustedes nadie los va a culpar por seguir con la misma historia. Yo me pregunto no más, ¿cuándo se van a hacer las cosas de otra manera?

[JUANA: When I was a girl I used to live in a farm next to San Nicolás. My father took care of the cattle. If something happened to an animal, it was docked from our food at the end of the month. The reason didn’t matter. My father was always to blame. I came here to Santiago at fifteen, because I didn’t want my children to be blamed for everything. But I can see things here are the same. Everything is always our fault. That’s just how it is. No one will blame you for not changing. Sometime I ask myself, when will things change?]

Her monologue is interrupted by screams of other parents accusing her of being a resentful woman among bigger insults that demanded her silence. However, Woods stresses out the importance of that monologue with the mise-en-scène. First of all, there is a slow Close-Up to Machuca’s mother while she is telling her story (the same technique used later by Larraín in Claudio’s monologue). Woods cuts then to a reaction shot of

Gonzalo’s face right when she asks when things are going to be done differently. As a member of the future upper-middle class, he is the one called-upon for these social changes. It is in Gonzalo, and not in Machuca, where lies all sense of agency. As Juana says, Machuca does not have that power because he will be the one to be blamed after all, even when she tried to protect him from that faith. Peter is powerless of any action because he will be a “proletariat”, a class targeted by Pinochet, which is demonstrated in the conclusion of the film. Therefore Gonzalo, member of the vast middle class (that

101

survived), is the symbolic body called upon for action. The sequence intends to open a critical space for Chile to act upon conflicts that remain to the present today.

Another iconic theme is brought during that sequence and it is the school’s deficit.

Father McEnroe uses their agricultural and farming experiments as a mean to surpass that deficit in the future:

FATHER MCENROE: Ya vamos a tener utilidades con la granja que manejan los alumnos. Entonces, compensaremos pequeño déficit con que estamos operando.

[FATHER MCENROE: We’ll soon have returns from the farm managed by the students. That will cover the small deficit we’re operating under.]

However, the pigs die of an unknown sickness and they have to be piled up and burned in front of Father McEnroe. The hope for the whole school project was dead, a metaphorical bridge to the socialist experiment of Allende.

The longing for another social solution – different from the social orders established at the time – was resisted, especially from the people belonging to the upper class. In fact, the Chile experiment was perceived as a threat to the elites. As such,

Allende’s populist experiment was a risk, especially for a country which had a strong international and economic position in terms of development. That fear, and the social polarization shown along the movie and especially in the church’s sequence, leads to the moment of the coup, which is represented in the film as a disaster: the characters seem shocked and numbed while everybody lies watching the TV in the dark (even Gonzalo is dressed in dark colors). Media, once again, serves as the link to the outside world. From that moment on, the government is usurped in the name of peace and social order. This homogeneity is imposed from the new the political power and forced upon the people.

The method favored by the military is declaring a state of exception. As Giorgio

102

Agamben explains, this space asserts an empty space of law where law itself is suspended in order to restitute order. In other words, it is an empty space that excludes all rights granted by law in order to reestablish Law. That suspension is always justified by an external threat that habilitates a state of war. In fact, according to the philosopher, this notion has been increasingly favored during the twentieth century, from the Nazi regime to the “War on Terror” discourse. The discourse was used by the military. As such, the coup is justified in the political arena and Wood represents with a cut to Pinochet declaring precisely his intention to “save” Chile from the Marxist threat.

PINOCHET (ON T.V.): Las fuerzas armadas y de orden han actuado en el día de hoy, solo bajo la inspiración patriótica de sacar al país del caos, que en forma aguda, lo estaba precipitando el gobierno marxista de Salvador Allende.

[PINOCHET (ON T.V.): The armed forces and order itself, today have responded driven purely by patriotic duty and nothing else, to save the country from the unyielding chaos of Salvador Allende’s Marxist government.

The state of exception was then “justified” to pursuit a national redefinition based, like all dictatorships, in a closed, oppressive and homogeneous government. Wood shoots the military on the street, the school doors being shut down with locks, the uniformity of the dressing code for the kids in Saint Patrick, the cutting of the hair of those students who had it too long, and a strict control of public expression. All of these are part of a sequence of images at the end of the movie that stresses up the rupture caused in Chile by the coup and its aftermath. In other words, these sequences are the visual representation of how law was suspended in order to establish the new Law, the new order. Fiction is therefore a symbolic reply to the political turmoil that remains to shape Chilean society today. The importance of showing the rupture in the polis, right after the moment of trauma (the coup), is shown in the series of visual tools (cuts to the boots of soldiers,

103

closing gates, soldiers pushing students, and so on) that Wood uses to reflect on those days.

3.4 Uncovering the Past: Isolation and Death in Post Mortem

In short order, the entire country had gotten the message: resistance is deadly. -Naomi Klein

As in Machuca, retelling history from film fiction is also the main concern in

Larraín’s new trilogy. However, of the three films, it is Post Mortem the one that deals directly with the coup and its aftermath, and in an even shorter time span than in Wood’s film. However, as it is characteristic of his work, Larraín takes its representation to a darker place, discarding the more appealing approach of the coming of age story and the childhood narrative. In fact, the main problem in Machuca is that the expectation of social change lays into a kid who, as such, loses all sense of agency (at least at that moment). The direct appeal in that Close-Up to Gonzalo critique works as a symbolic look to the viewer in the present. The character, as an alter-ego of the director, is unable within the film’s narrative to even avoid the ending of his parent’s marriage. Larraín, on the other hand, uses an adult character to reflect on the political implications of those days of September, 1973. Contrasting with Gonzalo, Mario does have a capacity of action within the narrative. In fact, he is inserted in the middle of the social and political turmoil of that year.

Once again the viewer is confronted with a familiar theme in postmodern aesthetics and in recent Chilean films as well; the story within the history or the micro- narrative versus the macro-narrative—to use Lyotard’s terminology. As such, Post

104

Mortem, as well as the other films in the trilogy, is an example of how fiction can be used to revise the past. As happened with Gonzalo’s story, the micro-narrative works as a symbolic figure to analyze the political implications of any given individual (with their own perspective and subjectivity) in the polis and how these impact our personal and collective identity.

Larraín establishes the tension between the individual and the collective in the first three minutes of the film. In fact, the Opening Shot of the film is a Dolly Shot that takes a military tank from underneath, as it sweeps a street filled with all sort of broken things and trash, as if it was a street of a city in the middle or after a war.27 There is nothing else going on but the sound effects of the tank, which for obvious reasons are very noisy. However, the sequence ends with a Cut To Mario’s front window, who is looking outside from inside his suburban house in a Santiago neighborhood. Therefore the viewer perceives an abrupt ending of the tank’s noise to the tranquil sounds of the suburbs. The transition goes from what seems to be a city in war to the normality of an every day morning, and beyond that, from the collective (Santiago and the future military intervention), to the individual (Mario looking out the window), making Post Mortem’s introduction to behave in an oppositional direction to the opening of Machuca (where you go from the individual to the collective). Both characters, however, are inserted within the fragmented polis of 1973, and both are icons used by the directors to revisit that traumatic moment of Chile.

27 A dolly or “tracking shot” is a sequence filmed with the camera placed in a small truck that rolls along dolly tracks. Many times the director will be carried by the dolly along some of the camera crew. In this case, the camera is placed behind the track and follows its track.

105

The insertion of both characters and both narratives in a retelling of the past through fiction work in similar ways. There is a presumption of agency in both Gonzalo and Mario, an expectation of them that responds to their protagonist roles and the implication of this as part of common narrative structure. If these two movies were

Hollywood blockbusters, for example, both characters would deal differently with events of the past, even when the story is fiction. If that were the case, the characters would succeed at some level even within the micro-narrative of their stories. Ben Affleck’s character in Pearl Harbor (2001) would be a classic example, where the “hero” gets to return alive after a battle that, according to a Voice-Over from the Evelyn character (Kate

Beckinsale), would change the course of America. Director Quentin Tarantino, whose latest works are mostly about postmodern re-appropriation, would have Hitler shot to death in the middle of a theater.28 However, this is not what happens in Machuca or in

Post Mortem. The agency of the main characters in both films is nullified, as they are symbols of a group in society who was unable to react, for different reasons, to the horror of the coup and the dictatorship, or even to the economical crisis of Allende’s last days.

As I mentioned earlier, Gonzalo’s sense of agency ends up in “a look” to the present. His condition as a child makes him unable to act. The only moment of action for him comes when he makes the soldier acknowledge that he is not from Machuca’s neighborhood, all in order to escape alive. His action comes as a result of fear, a response from his survival instinct. In that moment he uses the social class of his family as a shield

28 The example I am referring to is Inglourious Basterds. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Universal Pictures. 2009.

106

from the chaos he was witnessing in front of him. In that sense, Gonzalo returns to his familiar space of isolation in order to survive the horrors of the military.

Mario is also isolated. Even when he is an adult, his behavior and seclusion is much like Gonzalo’s at the beginning. Gonzalo’s innocence, however, is substituted with

Mario’s apathy into anything beyond his object of desire: Nancy. Larraín immediately presents this obsession in the sequence preceding the introduction of the film. The shot of

Mario looking out the window, not only portrays him as someone detached, but also uncovers his only passion and the reason why he seems to be looking out the window for a long period of time. In what it is a slow-tempo sequence – which works as a parallel to the character – the viewer will wait three minutes approximately to understand that he was waiting for his front neighbor to arrive in a cap. Mario practices his pose, an artificial reason of why he was going to be outside when Nancy arrives, and he finally comes up with the idea of getting out to pretend he is watering the plant (as another neighbor is also doing). At the end, Nancy arrives, gets out of the cap, and leaves Mario watering the street as he walks toward the middle of it (and the frame) in an attempt to get closer to her. Hence, Mario is detached from everything else but his affection to Nancy. He has her timed, he knows where she will be, and he fakes reasons to get close to her. In other words, his affection crosses a line that will prove to be perverse during the rest of the film. Outside of Nancy and his desire to “pololear” with her (to be his boyfriend), there is nothing else: no tanks, no crisis, no left or right, just Nancy. Therefore, his obsession will contrast with the remaining characteristics of this character.

In fact, there is something flawed in Mario and, once again, it is presented right in that introductory scene. Besides his behavior in terms of Nancy, his appearance is odd:

107

his look is distant while waiting, his long hair shares a popular haircut for younger persons while mixed with the grayness of his middle age hair, and his pale skin seems to be an extension of the color of his hair and the expression of his face. This is a character that, judging from that image, looks like a dead person. He is both dead and alive, and the former characteristic does not merely lies on his physical appearance, but on his behavior as well and, above all, on his apathy to anything else besides his obscure object of desire.

Mario is therefore a symbolic figure where the individual and the collective are represented at the same time. On the one hand, he is the zombie-like character that I have just described. On the other hand, he is both a symbol of a specific voice inside the polis conforming Chile in 1973, as well as the constant link between narrative and title.

Therefore, Larraín declares both Mario and Chile in a state of Post-Mortem with his main character.

The “death” of Mario enables the director to detach from a subjective point of view. Taking Machuca into consideration once again, even when the film is shot from a standard third person point of view, the viewer can relate the story with Gonzalo’s perception and understand the world he is witnessing. Such character identification is not possible in Post-Mortem. The only possible way to create a sensation of connection with

Mario is with a sense of detachment. In other words, the viewer can empathize with

Mario on the effect produced by his strangeness; s/he can sympathize with the character by feeling disconnected from him, even with his desperate infatuation with Nancy.

This effect of detachment produces an other from himself, which Adorno express as a fundamental characteristic of art. According to the philosopher, “Art acquires its specificity by separating itself from what it developed out of […] it exists only in relation

108

to its other; it is the process that transpires with its other (Aesthetic Theory, 3)”. In other words, the separation is what makes it specific, while depending on that contrast with its other. In Post Mortem, the character and its narrative produce a disconnection from that other that Mario incarnates, thus underlining its aesthetic function. As such, the film forces the viewer, incapable of establishing any empathy with the character, to “step- back” and analyze the film from an “outside”.

The aesthetic disconnection opens up a simulation of subjectivity. The viewer might have the sensation that, because he is only able to relate with the narrative by the interruption of any personal identification, he is empowered to have a bigger moral standard. Of course, this is only another aesthetical level, as the analysis of the viewer is feasible as a result of a subjective appreciation of fiction.

In that sense, it is possible to think of Post Mortem as an example of de- negotiation. The movie creates the illusion of a disruption to open a space to think about the politics that remain to shape the Chilean polis. In that sense, it rejects any pre- established interpretation of the past while demanding an interpretation from the spectator, one that, as I have mentioned, pretends to be objective without renouncing to the viewer’s sense of interpretation.

The multifaceted nature of de-negotiation makes it possible to go back to the traumatic moment of the coup and its political consequences. Larraín chooses to place the body of Allende himself at the table, in what Paul Julian Smith considers to be “Larraín’s most daring commentary on history” (“Art of Filmmaking”, 12). That sequence and its aftermath opens a series of tensions on what is said and what it is not, what can be traced

109

in history and what cannot, and above all, how can we approach this question in film

(art).

The body of Allende comes as surprise for the viewer, especially on a film where the entire political context seems to be happening behind the curtains. Even in a film like

Machuca, whose approach is similar, the images of Allende are those presented in the TV during his visit to the Soviet Union. Post Mortem, on the other hand, only shows a political manifestation, and then the political discussion at Nancy’s house. Therefore the body of Allende works as an element of shock for its direct reference to the political characters of those days. Suddenly, what seemed to be absent in the movie appears in front of the audience. At the same time, the depiction of the causes of death is too graphic.29 This sequence immediately suggest an insistence on bringing into discussion a topic that is not easy to talk about in Chile, and that has been cut off from the public discussion for a long period of time.

However, what can be said about Allende’s death if it remains to be a mystery (or at least part of a polemic debate)? It was as recent as May 23, 2011 that the body was exhumed for the third time to study, once again, if his death was the result of suicide or assassination. In terms of the movie, the fictional representation only brings up the questions and renounces to any definite assumption of truth. This is the result of the historic omissions and contradictions of the autopsy report. As such, the attempt to make

29 According to an interview to Larraín by Jonathan Marlow, the idea for Post Mortem came precisely after encountering a forensic report of Allende’s autopsy. In that sense, the entire movie develops from this emblematic scene. See “The Art of Filmmaking: Pablo Larraín.” Fandor.

110

the autopsy of the man who represented the entire nation is also incomplete. On the one hand the autopsy is frustrated by Mario’s inability to use the typewriter of the military.

On the other hand, it cannot be completed, as Sandra refuses to open up the body in order to make the intern exam. As a result Dr. Castillo (Jaime Vadell) is unable to open

Allende’s body and state his conclusion without finishing the exam.

Since that moment Allende’s body becomes an emblem of disinformation. In fact, his figure opposes the idea of using the body as a source of knowledge and information

(like it happens with the body of the detainee and the tortured). His body is present, but the answer to the cause of death or who pulled the trigger is not and even remains forty years later. In that sense, the scene where Mario and Sandra discuss the death of Allende is crucial:

MARIO: Se suicidó. SANDRA: Lo mataron. MARIO: Se suicidó. SANDRA: Lo mataron Mario.

[MARIO: He killed himself. SANDRA: He was killed. MARIO: He killed himself. SANDRA: He was killed, Mario.]

The way in which Larraín builds this sequence stresses out the divided opinions concerning the death of Allende. The insistence of using a sequence of Cut To the different actors shot in Close-Up works as an example of how Chileans are so divided concerning this topic. The implications of a suicide diminish the horror of Pinochet’s

111

coup; Allende was not his first victim. It is also read by many as a surrendering, instead of a fight to the end. However, these readings are all part of interpretations often shaped by the ideology of the person commenting on Allende’s death. For many, his suicide is also a challenge to Pinochet (his last one), robbing the latter the opportunity to imprison, torture and kill him in the public eye. In fact, there is no definite answer. There have been testimonies of both Allende shooting himself as well as Allende being shot. His fate will always be tainted by the radical divisions of the political ideologies of Chile, so drastically marked by the Left and the Right, as it happens in many Latin American countries. Larraín portrays this division in that interchange between Mario and Sandra; she portrays the politically motivated while Mario, in his zombie-like condition, accepts the discourse of the regime.

There is also a parallel between the presidential figure post mortem and Mario. In fact, the body of the president, which remains to be an icon of specific ideologies in Chile and Latin America, is de-politicized in the autopsy table. The manner in which Dr.

Castillo refers to the body strips Allende of any political value, which Sandra refuses to accept. Allende becomes a series of medical facts that, like Mario, seem to be mechanical. Therefore Post Mortem is the story of a dead man, a dead president (which embodies the collective) and, as a result, a dead nation. Once again there is a symbolic relationship between the individual and the collective or, in other words, a political commentary on the collective that results from the (fictional) individual.

However, Larraín’s use of Allende’s body, stripped from any political meaning, will politicize the body once again. As a result the director will use Allende as the first victim of Pinochet. An Allende stripped from any political value means an Allende post

112

mortem, and, at the same time, the future model for the rest of the nation. The political imposition of the General and the military was to strip Chile of any political ideology

(besides their own), and Allende at the table would be the model imposed to the polis. As such, any political reservation in Sandra will be forced to silence, a silence imposed by fear. This is precisely what happens when Captain Montes (Marcial Tagle) finds the body of a man she and Mario tried to save,30 making her to confront the military:

SANDRA: Doctor. ¿Qué pasó? Usted tiene que hacer algo doctor porque esta enfermera estaba bien, yo estuve con ella. ¿Qué hace aquí? Y él estaba herido. ¿Qué pasó? Yo no entiend…doctor, doctor, ¡Usted tiene que hacer algo! ¡Dígale lo que están haciendo aquí! ¿Cuándo van a terminar con esto? ¿Por qué no terminan de una vez con todo esto? … ¿Qué pasó? ¡Estas personas estaban aquí vivas porque yo las vi! ¡Porque este hombre yo lo salvé! Estaba herido. ¡Yo lo salvé! ¿Qué pasó? ¡Hijo de puta! ¡Que terminen con esto! CAPITAN MONTES: ¿Qué fue lo que dijo? SANDRA: ¡Que yo los salvé! ¡Que tiene que terminar con todo esto! ¡Termine! ¡Doctor dígale! CAPITAN MONTES: ¿Usted lo salvó? SANDRA: Dígale que se termine… ¡Sí! ¡Yo lo salvé! ¡Y usted me lo volvió a matar! Me lo volvió a matar porque… ¡Este hombre estaba aquí! ….

[SANDRA: Doctor, what happened? You have to do something. This nurse was fine. I was just with her! Why is here? And he was injured. What happened? I

30 Mario’s ambivalence allows him to have some shy attempts to make some sort of resistance. In fact, the coup seems to affect him too, even when he was detached from the beginning of the film. He is unable to complete the autopsy report and, with red eyes, smiles when he hears Doctor Castillo proclaim a suicide instead of assassination as a cause of death for the President. Another ambivalent resistance from Mario’s part is to respond to the cries of help of one moribund victim. His response is to take him to Sandra, ensuring she will do something for him. These efforts are random and do not mean any conscious resistance from the character. The ambivalence is clear if we take in consideration that previous to that sequence he rejects helping a woman trying to get the whereabouts of a beloved (is not clear the relationship).

113

don’t understand…Doctor, Doctor, you have to do something! Tell then what they are doing here! When they will stop with this? Why don’t they get it over with? What happened? These people were here, alive, because I saw them! Because I saved this man! He was wounded and I saved him! What happened? Son of bitches! Stop this at once! CAPTAIN MONTES: What did you say? SANDRA: I said I saved him! And you have to stop this! Make it stop, Doctor! Tell him! CAPTAIN MONTES: You saved him? SANDRA: Tell them to stop! Yes! I saved him! And you killed him again! You killed him again! Why? This man was here, alive!]

Her demands are cut short with the sounds of the captain’s gun. Fear, which is expressed all over Mario’s and Dr. Castillo’s face (and Sandra’s consequent silence and submission), is ensured with the threat of violence and the clear disregard of human life by those in power.31

The silenced imposed by violence shaped the society, and it is one of the reasons why there has been many films trying to uncover it. In fact, the film ends up with a metaphor of that imposed silence. After what Paul Julian Smith’s describes as Mario’s revenge to Nancy (for sleeping with Víctor and manipulating him), the former blocks the exit of their hideout with every piece of furniture he could find, leaving them to rot in there. The manner in which Mario puts every furniture, with tables and seats turned upside down (and fitting them like a puzzle or the Tetris video game), serves as a parallel of the disruption this imposed silenced meant for their people, a turning upside down of the country. At the same time, the extension of the scene is a metaphor of the long period

31 Captain Montes first makes a single shot to the roof, and then starts to shoot randomly at the bodies in a complete disregard of life and manifestation of power.

114

of time this silence was imposed. In other words, the final sequence portraits what the movie, along with others that offer a revision of the past, directly confronts.

As a result Post Mortem establishes once again a link with contemporary Chile.

The silence imposed in the final minutes of the film is a mirror reflection to Chilean society. It is important to consider that this silence was imposed like no other country in the Southern Cone. Argentina’s response to the end of the dictatorship was the reestablishment of the political awareness previous to the last junta for example. In the case of Chile, according to Catalina Donoso Pinto what made the dictatorship a traumatic experience was precisely its longevity (Películas que escuchan, 9). This implies that what

Naomi Klein describes as “the shock treatment” worked very well, planting seeds that remain to form the individuals living in Chile.

The concealed secrets created by the imposed silence are relived through the invented story. Fiction brings another instrument into the polis that expresses different possibilities to those blanks that were left behind. However, it accepts its lack of answers.

As I have mentioned, their narratives renounce any assumption of truth and affirm that the pain of that collective history can only be manifested by different subjective experiences. While testimonies use language to account for an experience too traumatic to pass on, fiction uses different layers to give a say to those silenced voices. It uses a variety of languages (written, verbal, cinematographic) to imagine the pain of the unimaginable. That possibility is not specific to Post Mortem, but it is shared in different films and other artistic representations, and it surpasses national borders as well. In that sense, Machuca and Larraín’s trilogy have a connection with other films in the past decade from other countries, like Garage Olimpo and La Mirada invisible in Argentina.

115

3.5 Underneath the Table

The connections across the border respond to a similar recent history for both

Chile and Argentina, as well as a similar political interest of uncovering those voices that were silenced from the polis during their respective oppressive governments. In fact,

Klein mentions how Pinochet (following examples first experimented in Brazil) imposed the “manual” on how to deal with dissent and which type of economical order would be imposed. According to the critic, “declassified Brazilian documents just released in

March 2007, weeks before the Argentine generals seized power, they contacted Pinochet and the Brazilian junta and “outlined the main steps to be taken by the future regime.”

(The Shock Doctrine 88). Klein expands on how the Argentine junta took notes from

Pinochet:

The newly declassified documents from Brazil show that when Argentina’s generals were preparing their 1976 coup, they wanted “to avoid suffering an international campaign like the one that has been unleashed against Chile.” To achieve that goal, less sensational repression tactics were needed – lower-profile ones capable of spreading terror but not so visible to the prying international press. (89)

The last military junta learned from Pinochet’s mistakes of using public violence at the beginning of his regime and proceeded to make people disappear, a practice also imposed in Uruguay. This was all part of the Condor Operation, which used terror and “shock” to impose the first experiments of the neo-liberal agenda. This violence was justified by a

State of exception, a fictional war against the threat of Marxism in Chile, and, in

Argentina, the threat of guerrilla. However, in practice, it was a war against society and anyone who represented a threat to the political agenda of the regimes imposed in power.

It was a war that shared so many characteristics and political motivations that it established a connection beyond their respective national borders.

116

The so-called “Dirty War” and the “War against the Marxist threat” facilitated a culture of war that remains today in Chile (with a Police-State).32 On the other hand, the culture of war led to the fall of the last junta in Argentina with the Falklands War.

Nonetheless, that same mentality also led to a confrontation between the two countries that almost ended in war. The incident, known as the “Beagle Conflict”, is what motivates the narrative of Mi mejor enemigo, a transnational collaboration between the two countries that were at the brisk of war in 1978.

However, even though the “dues-ex-machina” is the war against each other, the film uses this narrative element to stress out the transnational connection of these neighbor countries. The link is underlined by a continuous questioning of the other as

“the enemy”, starting with the title of the film. As a result, once both military parties (one convoy from Chile – where the protagonist and narrative voice belongs – and another from Argentina) encounter each other, there is a constant revision of the concept of

“enemy”. The interactions between the two convoys resist this definition (imposed by the military regimes) with their actions, especially with the unifying factor between the two countries and the whole continent, the love for football (soccer). This questioning is underlined by Lieutenant Ocampo (Miguel Dedovich), who responds to the definition of the Chileans as enemy with “enemy? Which enemy?” (“¿Qué enemigo? ¿Qué enemigo?”).

32 Even though Chile returned to a perceived democracy in 1990, today’s violent response of the police (carabineros) to the student movement in Chile is an example of a Police-State mentality that is shared in many other countries with neoliberal agendas.

117

The idea of an enemy, necessary for the perpetuation of war and constantly used by both Pinochet and the last junta, is therefore confronted in this film. The tension resulting from such an extreme differentiation of the Other leads to a fire exchange in the climactic scene of the film, which gets Lieutenant Ocampo shot and “El Chilote” killed.

In the same manner the film reacts to the imaginary of war (perpetuated by the artificial creation of the enemy). If the idea of the Other as enemy is artificially created to manipulate the people conforming the polis, then its final act of war is also an imaginary.

That notion is underlined in the narrative with the Voice-Over that wraps the film up. It was a war that never existed but that was real, both for the people of these two nations, as for the fictional characters that aim to represent those days.

Another definition confronted by Bowen’s film is that of national frontiers, which was what caused the confrontation in the first place. If the polis/nation is just an artificial creation to conform and define a specific community, then the borders that divide the different communities are as fictional as the idea of different nations, of an enemy, or as the film itself. This dichotomy is represented when the two convoys confront each other for the first time:

OCAMPO: Este… Mire Ferrer, yo estaba pensando que ni usted ni yo tenemos la más pálida idea de dónde pasa la línea de la frontera. A mi me parece que eso nos puede traer algún inconveniente. ¿Qué le parece?

[OCAMPO: So… Ferrer, we both have no idea where the border line is. I think that could be inconvenient. What do you think?]

The comedy produced with this sequence is a direct critique of the concept of a national border, especially between these two countries. As a result, the line established by both convoys is completely arbitrary. Furthermore, the fire to mark the line gets beyond

118

control, and does not follow the boundaries established between the men. The narrator explains this as a result from the wind:

RODRIGO (V.O.): El viento de la Patagonia se encargó de marcar su propia frontera. Ni Ferrer ni Ocampo podían contra eso.

[RODRIGO (V.O.): The wind of Patagonia marked its own border line. Neither Ferrer nor Ocampo couldn’t count on that.]

Therefore there is an opposition between frontiers established by men and the unity of the land.

There is a division, but it is marked in the rivalry of the football game. Mi mejor enemigo hints therefore that these divisions are but a child’s game. They exist, but they are completely arbitrary and, in the end, they work to connect different groups of people in the desire to compete and win, but most of all, to share the experience of the game.

3.6 Crossing the (Killing) Line

The division of both countries and how close they came to war is a subplot in the first movie of Larraín’s trilogy, Tony Manero. In fact, the incident is mentioned right before the indifferent Raúl is about to do his Tony Manero dance imitation:

ANIMADOR: Mi linda señorita, quiero decir algo importante. Resulta de que nuestro país y Argentina el año pasado estuvieron en muy mala situación de amistad, pero ya afortunadamente todo se solucionó. A tal punto queremos demostrar esta hermandad que hemos contratado a una linda modelo argentina, la señorita Vanesa. ¿Cómo está usted? ¡Ella es Vanesa! ¿Qué te parece Chile? VANESA A la verdad me encanta Chile, como me encanta mi país Argentina, y bueno como decías vos también a mi me da mucha pena que estuvimos pelando por unos pedacitos de tierra si en realidad todos tenemos que aprender a compartir, ¿no? ANIMADOR

119

Naturalmente que sí. ¿Ah? ¡Además estamos unidos, pues! VANESA Sí, y entonces no hay por qué pelear.

[HOST: My beautiful darling, I have something important to tell you. Last year, we almost went to war against Argentina because of a diplomat incident. Luckily, everything is OK now. To express our wish for peace, we’ve hired Vanessa, a beautiful Argentinean model! How are you? She is Vanessa! What do you think of Chile? VANESSA: I really love Chile, but I also love Argentina. Well, it hurts me as much as it hurts you, to be fighting over a little piece of land. We have to learn to share. HOST: You’re absolutely right. Plus, we are all united! No? VANESSA: Yes, so there is no reason to fight.]

The TV host (Enrique Maluenda) and the Argentinean model also insist in the fraternal bonds between the two nations, which is one of the main themes in Mi mejor enemigo.

However, Raúl could care less about the political tensions in his country, or with other countries to that matter. Tony Manero presents the political and historical context of

Chile as a subplot in the same manner that it happens in Post Mortem or in Wood’s

Machuca. It all takes place beneath the narrative of the main character, contrasting the particular with the collective. Nonetheless, as it happens with María Luisa in Wood’s film and with Mario in Post Mortem, there is a disconnection between the character and the rest of the people. However, Mario is an alter-ego of Raúl. While Mario’s disconnection with the political context responded to Nancy (a failed stage artist), Raúl’s object of desire is John Travolta. In other words, both characters are obsessed with a show personality that numbs any political agency in them, at least concerning Allende and Pinochet. In that sense Mario is Raúl’s copy (both trapped in the obsession of spectacle), as Raúl pretends to be Tony Manero’s copy.

120

The notion of the copy is crucial in the whole film. The movie begins with Raúl

Paredes going to a TV show of imitations (“Festival”), as he confuses the week presenting the Chilean Tony Manero and arrives the week when the gig was about Chuck

Norris. In that sense, Tony Manero resonates with the debate of aesthetics as a mimetic of reality. However, art is translated into what Adorno critically refers to as the “Culture

Industry”. Both characters are fascinated by a figure of the society of spectacle described by Guy Debord, though their fascination alienates them as individuals and makes them unable to achieve political awareness.33

Raúl’s obsession, which isolates him from the rest of society, not only distracts him from the political context in where he was living, but alienates him to the point where he becomes an alien, a queer character. Every sequence that he is presented practicing Manero’s dance moves in Saturday Night Live are-off. Raúl, while clearly copying the dance to perfection, falls twice while practicing, gets exhausted while doing the dance in his room, and seems to be suffering from spasms in every sudden move of the dance. Travolta, on the other hand, made it look as if every dance move was natural, part of his persona. In that sense, Raúl becomes an echo of the monstrous Dorian Gray’s painting, the ugly side of Travolta’s seemingly perfection.34 Hence, while Travolta is young and charismatic, Paredes is old (a fact he hates and tries to hide) and could not

33 For Debord the separation of reality as a result of the society of spectacle does not necessarily contrast with social activity. (8) Larraín’s characters in Tony Manero and Post Mortem are capable of such, but their sense of political and social conscience as well as solidarity is shattered as a result of their fascination with this culture.

34 Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Life was not only a symbol of male eroticism, but his image, along with the Bee Gees soundtrack, was emblematic to the peak of the disco era. In a sense, it is as if his image with the finger pointing to the roof had an aura of the times, as dictated through media (Hollywood). Tony Manero’s poster is a darken copy of that (original) image.

121

even smile in the show where he finally got his chance to “be” Tony Manero on TV.

While Travolta was an icon of mega-maleness, Paredes is unable to have sex or even keep an erection. While Travolta’s dialogue was as organic as Hollywood can get,

Paredes’ copy of the language is forced and twisted with a strong (foreigner’s) accent.

Language is in fact one of the main instruments that Raúl tries to use in order to

“become” Tony Manero. Language defines different human cultures, beliefs and behaviors, which is why the first instrument for colonialism is erasing language and substituting it with the one used by the colonizer. It is also through language that humans tend to gain an access to the other. As a result we see Castro’s character memorizing every line of Manero, practicing the sounds without understanding the meaning, making of the copy his language. Larraín shows him repeating the lines he saw earlier in the theater to his dance partners as if they were his own words. Everybody acted impressed as Raúl’s supposed mastery of the foreign language, ending the sequence when Paulina asks him if he knows English. As such, Raúl tries to become Tony Manero by transforming into a copy.

However, when the main character uses the character’s lines as his own words

(his own language), he reverts the copy upside down; the copy is “the original” or, in

Debord’s words, “the true is a moment of the false”. (9) In other words, he becomes the original Tony Manero. As a result, the notion of originality in the film, so important in

Larraín’s Fuga, is part of the culture of spectacle, the latter taking the place of the real

(original). As he transforms himself into the character, however, Raúl separates himself from the others, and he becomes the symbol itself:

CONY:

122

Más tonto usted si el otro es gringo. Como usted no, usted es de acá no más po, como nosotros, la misma comuna. Somos todos la misma comuna RAÚL: Ya no, po. Ya no más.

[CONY: You’re such a fool. He’s an American. You’re not. You belong here, like the rest of us, from the same neighborhood. We all live in the same neighborhood. RAÚL: Not anymore. No more.]

His words (“not anymore”) and his constant suggestion that he lives for the show (“el espectáculo”), seal his detachment from the rest of society. We cannot forget that his attendance on the imitation show was about “being” Tony Manero. In fact, the animator kept presenting each of the contestants as that “Tony Manero” (“él dice yo soy Tony

Manero”) instead of an imitator of the character.

However, as Raúl really believed to be Tony Manero, there could not be another one. Consequently, Raúl’s detachment from the rest of the people turns violent

(contrasting with Mario whose violence comes at the end). Therefore he resentfully looks at the other contestants (younger than him), he defecates on Goyo’s dress so he cannot go to the TV show and compete, and he starts to stalk the winner of the contest (at which point the movie ends but the viewer could guess that the winner and his wife are going to be killed by Raúl). In other words, the idea that there is no other Manero but himself makes of Raúl the portrayal of a serial killer. His sense of alienation is such that he kills whoever gets in the midst of his desire to be Manero. Castro’s character shows no sign of remorse killing an old woman, stealing from a man killed by the special police, brutally murdering the theater projector and his wife (and then stealing the money in the cash register along with the film) just because they substituted Saturday Night Life with

Grease (another Travolta film), killing the floor-glass vendor to steal the rest of the

123

glasses needed for his show, and eventually killing the contest’s winner. He also leaves his colleagues in the hands of the special police, escaping through a window to get to the

TV station with no sense of solidarity with them. In fact, he is shown more than once escaping the military and the enforcers of the dictatorship. He acknowledges how their violence works and avoids it while not showing interest in any political positioning in favor or against the dictatorship. As a result, his first victim is killed after praising the

General, and he later throws out to the garbage the political propaganda against Pinochet that the man shot by the police was carrying. The only thing of importance for him was to be Tony Manero.

Raúl Paredes becomes therefore a symbol, not of an era (like John Travolta’s character), but of a society submerged in spectacle and violence, the former used to distract people from the latter. Once again there is a relationship between the individual or particular story with the collective. On one hand, Paredes’s violence makes him a symbolic figure of a society ripped apart by violence. The film illustrates that violence had become part of society’s core. Military following people, police shooting political dissidents in broad daylight, political persecution and robberies also in daylight are examples of a violence that is ordinary for the characters. Furthermore there is violence against the different people in the polis, marked by jealousy and racism. The latter is expressed by the old lady that was robbed in the beginning of the movie (Paredes’ first victim):

MUJER: Es la raza…menos mal que hay gente decente como usted […] ¿Usted sabía que el general Pinochet tiene ojos azules? […] Es raro, ¿no? Con tanto mapuche que hay.

[WOMAN: They are form a bad race. Thank God there are decent people like you. 124

[…] Did you know that General Pinochet has blue eyes? […] Strange, isn’t? With so many Mapuche Indians…]

In that sense the idea imposed by the military of a homogenous polis was nothing but an illusion and, underneath that, the divisions were as evident as in 1973. Furthermore, there is no sense of solidarity, which was attempted under Allende. Apathy took its place, and the desire not only to survive, but also to survive at the expense of others. That mentality leads to the crucial moment when Raúl leaves his colleagues in the hand of the special police. However, Raúl’s act of treason falls short to Cony’s (Amparo Noguera), who accused her own daughter as a result of her jealousy. As it happens with the main character, Cony’s only obsession is to be with Raúl. As her daughter becomes a threat to that obsession, she has to “kill her”.

The relationship shown in Tony Manero between the individual with the polis does not end within the national borders of Chile. As I mentioned earlier, this violence, apathy and disconnection shares characteristics with Argentina and other countries of the

Southern Cone. In that sense, Larraín’s use of the particular narrative as a symbol of the collective narrative works as a broader level as well. Tony Manero is as much about the specific re-telling of history in Chile as it is a critique on the violence that left the Condor

Operation and how it shaped the Southern Cone. In fact, the lost of empathy shown in these characters was the wanted result of the politics imposed by the military regimes. As

Naomi Klein explains, this lack of solidarity with the other was in fact “the cutthroat ethos at the heart of laissez-faire capitalism-‘looking out for No. 1,’” (113). Thus in Tony

Manero, Paulina had to be eliminated and Raúl felt he needed to take care of anyone stopping him from being the one and only Tony Manero.

125

Tony Manero also inserts itself within the tensions between the private and the collective as an object of art (film) in the global world. Its use of John Travolta’s figure does not only attest of a society obsessed with the north and the politics implanted by them and the Chicago Boys, but it also stresses out the connection with Hollywood.

Larraín borrows the images from Hollywood to transform it into a political commentary that links the film with national cinema from all over the globe, as well as with United

States. The transnational connection is established from south to north through art.

Therefore the main character is a serial killer, which is a phenomenon commonly known in the United States and one of the most profitable villains for American Film and

Television.35

These connections are necessary for the distribution success of the film and for the establishment of Larraín as a household name. The director is part of a new generation of directors in Chile struggling to find their voice and world recognition. They are also a new industry, given that dictatorship – which basically killed Chilean cinema – ended in 1990. The new investment produced one of the best cinema technologies in

Latin America, where directors from other countries take their films to be polished. In fact, Roberto Trejo mentions that the past decade was of great importance for the industry:

[…] durante la década pasada se logró desarrollar una serie de ventajas competitivas en el mercado audiovisual latinoamericano: se desarrolló la

35 The figure is highly popular at the moment, with shows like Dexter, Bates Hotel, and Hannibal leading the way in television. Dexter is in fact the most profitable show for Showtime at the moment. However, the fascination for this character can be traced back to Hitchcock’s Shadows of a Doubt (1943) and the popular Psycho (1960). The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and the Hannibal Lecter franchise brought back the fascination with the serial killer figure.

126

más avanzada plataforma de postproducción (edición de imagen y sonido) de la región; se ha postproducido cerca del 60% del cine publicitario de Latinoamérica y actualmente edita cerca del 25% de los filmes sudamericanos en particular de Brasil, Argentina, Perú y Colombia; que sus directores son los más valorados por las agencias publicitarias de la región, lo cual permite ser el país que más exporta cine publicitario en Iberoamérica […] (Cine, neoliberalismo y cultura,118-9)

[ […] during the past decade it was developed a series of competitive packages in the Latin-American audiovisual market: developing of the most advanced postproduction platform (Visual and Sound Editing) of the region; there has been a production of near 60% of advertising film in Latin America and near 25% of South American films, especially from Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Colombia, are now edited in Chile; and Chilean directors are among the most desired in terms of advertising agencies which makes of Chile the country that exports more advertising film in Latin America. […] ]

However, in terms of production Chile falls short to the massive and continual production of Argentina, where the government invests and protects their national cinema from

Hollywood. The lack of this government protection in Chile, plus years of understanding

Hollywood as cinema, subtracts numbers to Chilean films, and leave the new directors with a lack of financial success, which as an industry, is needed. As a result and in terms of names, Wood has been the only director with some sort of recognition and success.36

Larraín therefore builds his political narrative along a powerful figure from Hollywood, which as I have explained, work in different levels to review the political implications of the dictatorship.

The strategy is already producing results. Tony Manero placed the director in

Netflix, granting him immediate distribution in the United States. The third and final film

36 National comedies normally do well since the nineties. However, according to Trejo it was Galaz’s “El Chacotero Sentimental” (1999) who marked a difference in terms of audience and the new cinema. (102)

127

of the trilogy, No (2012), where the talents of world recognized actor Gael García Bernal joined the casting, recently gained an Academy Nomination for Best Foreign Film. These successes are necessary in terms of viewership and the new global approach of borrowing from Hollywood and fiction to approach more people. The greater the volume, the better chance the film have an opportunity to create a sense of reflection in terms of the audience and through art, a distinctive trait from documentaries. However, this is yet another example of how de-negotiation works. Tony Manero, as well as the other films discussed in this chapter, is inserted within the need for financial success and worldwide recognition while raising political awareness through fiction. Trejo expands on this in terms of Chilean film:

En esta aparente paradoja se encierra la doble naturaleza de las mercancías audiovisuales en el capitalismo contemporáneo: por una parte, fuerza de trabajo creadora de contenidos y, por otra, creadora de audiencias/públicos para la industria en su conjunto. (110)

[This apparent paradox holds the key of the double nature of audiovisual merchandise in contemporary capitalism: on the one hand, labor work of creative content and, on the other, targeting new audiences for the industry as a whole.]

This raises questions in terms of the effect. These films need to be a commodity in order to reach more people. The opposite effect would be the isolation of the aesthetic manifestation only accessible to educated elite, like it happened with other avant-garde movements in Europe and Latin America. In that sense, the relation of de-negotiation – between the political intention and the pressures of the market for economical success – becomes essential in the political effect of a work of art like a film. As such one could question the possibility of a political result in terms of social and global awareness.

Furthermore, if a financial success and a bigger audience are required for a bigger political impact, the lack of massive support in a country where Hollywood controls the

128

market means that productions are falling short to the expectations. In other words, if only a few groups of people are watching these films, one has to question how real the challenge is to the official political discourses that shape the community.

The culmination of Larraín’s saga and the direction he, along with the new generation of directors in Chile take, will be crucial to the future resonance of film in

Chile and abroad. In other words, it will take more time to clearly understand the political resonances of this “project” and if that interaction can lead to a better audience and a bigger support of the masses. However, these films are clearly opening the doors to new projects while embracing, at the same time, the tensions that are pertinent in the interaction of film as a massive form of art and those pertinent to the contemporary polis.

129

CHAPTER 4:

THE NOSTALGIC RETURN: REPRESENTING THE PAST IN ARGENTINE

LITERATURE AS A RESPONSE TO THE PRESENT

No hay memoria pura, ¿sabés? -Sylvia Molloy

Palabras, sueltas o agrupadas, retazos de frases y aun páginas enteras han empezado a pasar por su conciencia, arrastradas por el viento que, desde que ha abierto los portales del recuerdo, ha empezado a soplar cada vez más fuerte desde el pasado. -Carlos Gamerro

The search of an identity is what lies beneath the plot of El común olvido (A

Common Oversight). In that novel, Daniel is a gay Argentinean who works as a librarian in New York. After his mother dies, he returns to Buenos Aires to fulfill her last wishes for her ashes to be thrown into the River Plate. He meets there with Beatriz, an old acquaintance of her mother who decides to help him with the disposal of his mother’s remains. It is Beatriz who offers him a spot for the ashes inside her family slot in the cemetery after Daniel’s failure to find a proper and legal way to throw them into the river.

Making contact with Beatriz, along with the information she timidly shares with

Daniel about his mother, leads to the main character’s realization that he has forgotten his

130

childhood memories. There is a missing past, memories that Daniel lost and that he starts to crave after his encounter with Beatriz, who assumes Virgil’s role as a guide in the

Divine Comedy. Her role is more limited than Dante’s guide though, as she starts to appear and disappear in Daniel’s life only when she desires, settling the meetings herself.

It is thanks to Beatriz, however, that Daniel starts to meet other characters who will guide him in his voyage down memory lane: Samuel, a gay friend of her mother who had an utopian love with her and whose friendship died because of a common lover, Eduardo

García, who was the family’s lawyer, Cirilo and Peter Dowling, who where friends of

Daniel’s father, Ana, who was Daniel’s aunt, and Charlotte Hays, an old friend and lover of her mother. All of these characters start to intrigue Daniel over what will become an obsession for him: trying to recover a memory long forgotten. What then motivates the novel is the reinvention of memory. It is not by chance that one of the main characters in

Daniel’s quest is Ana, who lives in an asylum and who, like his mother, suffers from a disease that affects her memory.37 Both sisters lack the capacity to remember, which eventually ends in their demise and which also echoes the deficient memory of Daniel about his childhood.

In that sense, Daniel’s obsession becomes a way to leave that space of oblivion where both her mother and aunt end, filling out a sense of personal identity that can delineate his existence as a person. The mother will eventually cease to be that old lady who died alone in New York and who lost some communication with her son over her last years, and will become something else, a youthful character in another Argentina, an

37 Julia, Daniel’s mother, does not suffer the same sickness as Ana, but from a strange sickness where an excess of body minerals ended up consuming her memory.

131

Argentina that ceased to be the moment she escaped with Daniel to the United States. His mother becomes Julia, a painter with a vivid existence before the political turmoil of the sixties and seventies in Argentina. She also becomes a person who demanded everybody’s attention, who double-crossed her sister for a lover as well as Samuel, and who had a secret: her love affair with Charlotte, an odd discovery for Daniel when it was very clear that she was not happy with his identity as a homosexual.

Julia’s love affair created a family crisis with Daniel’s father that leads to the climactic moment of Daniel’s missing years: the escape from Argentina. The nature of the relationship of Daniel’s parents leads to two traumatic events in the narrative. On the one hand, a car accident where little Daniel broke his arm while Julia was driving the car alongside Charlotte—an event he completely forgot and that is revealed near the end of the novel. The second event was Julia’s encounter with Michael, Daniel’s father. The father, who felt his masculinity threatened by Julia and Charlotte’s relationship, enraged and drunk, confronted Julia directly, threatening her to dissolve the marriage only if he throws the boy through the balcony. Raged by the threat to her son’s life, she escapes to the United States without saying a word to Charlotte, who was brutally attacked by a man sent by Michael.

At the end of the novel Daniel finds more information that he wanted to know and decides to throw away most of his father’s letters and Julia’s diary. However, his discovery fulfills the representation of a past that made him closer to a word that was never his: that of Argentina. As a result, his quest distances him from his life as a New

Yorker and his Venezuelan partner, Simón, a detachment that is left wide open at the end of the novel.

132

Daniel’s desire to know the past echoes a need and desire of retelling the past.

That desire is what motivates the story of Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara (A yuppie in the Che Guevara’s Column).38 Written by Carlos Gamerro, the novel tells the story of Ernesto Marroné, a businessman who, in contrast with Daniel, does remember his past. However, he is forced to face that past and relive it when, during the epilogue, he finds the poster of Che Guevara in his teenage son’s bedroom. The symbol of Guevara makes Ernesto (who shares the name of Ernesto “Che” Guevara) realize he has to tell his son about his previous years, when he was part of the leftist movement of “Montoneros”, a group that proposed an armed revolution following the ideals of Guevara. As a result, the narrative goes back in time to the seventies in Argentina, where there was a social crisis that led to the military coup of March 26, 1976.

There is a chaotic atmosphere in the novel, where “Montoneros” and other communist groups were fighting the government in the name of the revolution while the police, the military and specialized underground groups like the AAA39 were trying to eradicate these movements. Ernesto is trapped in the middle of this when his boss is captured by the “Montoneros” and demand a ransom for his release (a common practice of the group in order to obtain money). However, they stage his killing, so the transaction

38 The novel is a sequel of Las aventuras de los bustos de Eva (The Eva’s Bust Adventures), written by the same author, a novel which also tells the story of Marroné while making a parody of Argentinean’s past and the “Montoneros” movement. According to the author, at first the two novels were intended to be just one, but he later decided to divide it in two, one focusing on the iconic figure of Eva Perón in Argentina, and the other focusing on Ernesto “Che” Guevara, another iconic inspiration for the leftist revolutionary movements in Argentina. However, I am focusing on the second part because of the complexities offered by the novel’s conclusions and its link with Cuba and other radical groups of the left in Latin America.

39 The AAA or Anti-Communist Alliance of Argentina (“Alianza Anti-comunista Argentina”) was an extreme right death squad that started to be active during Isabel Perón’s presidency. It was supposed to follow, kidnap and kill communists, but they ended killing any threat to the military junta’s government.

133

can be completed without the interference of the police force, which was filled with corruption. His boss, Tamerlán, orders Ernesto to be in charge of his rescue, after suspecting a foul play by his successor, who was in charge until then. However, Ernesto was part of the armed struggled before and witnessed the killing of another member in front of him,40 which move the “Montoneros” to contact Marroné to help them with the transaction. Ernesto’s involvement underlines his double nature: a business yuppie on the one hand, and a rebel who identified with the struggle “of the people” on the other.

Gamerro’s novel sets in motion the unstable elements that were part of the national polis of that past, elements and topics that remain to be controversial even today.

To talk about politics is not only to talk about political parties, but about history, the social struggle, the militaries and the social classes in constant fiction. Ernesto represents, on one hand, the businessman who favored capitalism and, on the other hand, the armed groups of the left who intended to impose a communist regime that followed the Cuban revolution. Ernesto lays in the middle of those two poles, as he is forced to be two different characters along the novel, returning, at the end of the narrative and after the dictatorship, to his place as a businessman.

The social turmoil and the years after the militaries took over are the focus of

Martin Kohan’s Dos veces junio (Two Times June). Kohan’s book is a novel where everything that is happening outside the plot is implied without being direct or obvious.

There are also two plots being represented or two main stories; one with the narrative voice, and one underneath the main events of the plot. Divided into small parts between

40 Those events are part of the plot in Gamerro’s previous novel Las aventuras de los bustos de Eva.

134

each chapter, the novel mainly focuses on the experience of a conscript under his obligatory year of service for the military in June, 1978. The historical context of that time, besides the dictatorship, was the World Cup, celebrated in Argentina with the military’s unconditional support and with a limitless budget for its completion. The narrator, as a young cadet, is assigned as the driver to an important Doctor (Captain

Mesiano) and during the development of their relationship he becomes indirectly involved with the crimes against humanity committed by the government in power. This plot is interrupted in a number of passages with a second narrative voice of a pregnant woman tortured in Quilmes, implying the Clandestine Detention Center known as ‘El

Pozo’ (The Well). There she gives birth to a boy who, at the end of the novel, is revealed to be a child that Dr. Mesiano had given to her sister, who was unable to give birth.

However, no apparent resolution is given at the end. In the epilogue, both soldier and doctor meet again in June of 1982, at the end of the dictatorship. Dr. Mesiano does not pay for his crimes, although he keeps repeating that there are difficult times ahead, and the former soldier goes to have the same dream he had with a prostitute the night he took

Mesiano to acquire the child. The novel refuses to bring the ‘criminals’ to justice, preferring instead a fictional representation that leaves the reader to fill the blanks with the historical events that started to become public even since the end of the dictatorship in

Argentina. For the writer, the representation of violence can only be achieved by leaving those blanks. Refusing to give graphic descriptions, the novel insists that the worse part of that violent past is that it was seized from the polis, leaving only a void to fill.

The representation of violence, that is, what tries to fill that absence, is precisely what motivates Kohan’s writing. His approach is that of a revision, a déjà vu, a web of

135

stories that are connected within the political (historic) imaginary of a nation. In fact,

Kohan’s characters are placed in a time and place that allows them to work as metaphors of the parties at stake during the dictatorship. All the characters working with the regime are metaphors of the system established by the junta: Sgt. Torres, Dr. Mesiano, Dr.

Padilla and Corporal Leiva. Given that metaphorical meaning, it is no surprise that we have a nameless narrator, a symbol for an Argentina that just wanted to survive the dictatorship by following orders and not questioning the rules of the militaries. In a sense, he takes the place of the victims, which are also nameless, except for Guillermo, the son of the pregnant woman. From the mother who cannot escape the detention center to the girl raped by four soldiers in the middle of nowhere, none of them have any possibility of escaping. Outnumbered and overpowered, they can only accept with resignation their unknown fates.

However, in contrast with the victims, the narrator renounces any action, while the victims are robbed of any possibility of action. Thus, the nameless character becomes a victim of his luck (his time in the military was a result of a lottery), and a witness of a system that was using extreme violence to ‘restore order’.

This “order” is the main focus in Ciencias morales (School for Patriots). Taking place in the final days of the dictatorship in 1982, the novel follows the story of María

Teresa, a new school prospector in the National School (“Colegio nacional”). Inside the school’s walls, she ceases to be the young conservative woman who lives with her mother and becomes a symbol of order for the students. She has many tasks but all of them respond to the need of imposing discipline to the students, echoing the world

136

outside school, where the military were imposing an oppressive control over the population.

However, there is a need to watch the people in order to control them. As a result, the need to maintain discipline in the novel starts to mutate into a darker obsession when

María thinks she smelled cigarettes over one of the students. Her desire to be noticed by

Mr. Biasutto, the prospector’s supervisor, leads her to think that she needs to catch the students that are smoking, therefore breaking the school’s rules. It also leads her to think that the only place that they could be smoking is in the boy’s bathroom, a space forbidden for her but that she trespasses in order to watch the students. The act of watching the students in the boy’s bathroom, behind a closed cubicle, turns into a perverse routine where she goes from watching the students, mimicking them and urinating when they do.

If María Teresa becomes corrupted by the obsession to control and catch whoever was breaking the rules, Mr. Biasutto would be revealed to be the symbol of corruption itself. A character who achieved that position by releasing a list of subversives in the school – thus forming part of the military government – he is the maximum symbol of order in the school. As a result and because of the perversity of the obsession for control, he rapes

María Teresa in the boy’s restroom, after he discovers her there. The act was supposed to become a routine, as was María’s act of going to the boy’s restroom before. That is the reason why, after the second time he rapes her, he instructs her of repeating the act:

Sale del baño junto con ella. En los pasillos del colegio no se ve nadie. Caminan un poco a la par, hasta que el señor Biasutto se para. Ella se para también. -El lunes la quiero acá mismo, ¿sabe? […] Acá mismo, en el baño, ¿sabe? Buscando a esos alumnos que están violando las reglas. […] Me entendió,

137

¿no? […] Sí, señor Biasutto. (Ciencias 211)

[He leaves the restroom beside her. There’s no one in the school halls. They walk almost side by side, until Mister Biasutto stops. She also stops. -I want you here again on Monday, you hear me? […] Right here, in the restroom, understood? Looking for those students that are breaking the rules. […] Understood, no? […] Yes, Mister Biasutto.]

That Monday never comes, as the dictatorship falls and the all of the administrative members of the school are replaced after the establishment of a democratic model.

4.1 A Sense of Identity

…siempre veo borrosas las cosas del pasado. -Sylvia Molloy

The return to Argentina is a return to a different world for Daniel. In fact, right from the beginning of the novel, he repeats the idea of entering a different world: “No, the world of my mother isn’t mine, nor is this my country” (“No, no es mío el mundo de mi madre, ni es éste mi país”) (13). By entering a world where he does not belong, Daniel tries to fill the separation between him and his dead mother.

Nonetheless, his interest to dispose of her mother’s ashes quickly becomes an interest in knowing more about that unknown world. Daniel’s actions change then to an attempt to tame that world, to enter it, to feel part of that place he lost when he was a child.

In other words, Daniel’s quest becomes more of an existential journey where the concept of his subjectivity is at stake.

Yet, there is a tension within the notion of “self” built by Daniel and it is represented by his mother. He cannot make sense of who he is as an Argentinean or what

138

is it the he is supposed to be as a member of that community when the life of his mother and his past life are blurry:

¿Cómo imaginarme, en esta ciudad pobre y abaratada, la juventud de mi madre cuando apenas recuerdo la mía? Yo tenía sólo doce años cuando me llevó de aquí y a los doce no se han almacenado suficientes recuerdos, quiero decir recuerdos de lugar que permitan recrear, de lejos, el espacio. (29)

[How can I imagine my mother’s youth in this wrecked and poor city when I can’t even remember mine? I was only twelve years old when she took me away from here and there aren’t that many memories storage at that age. And I mean a memory of a place that leads you to recreate that space from far away.]

Daniel’s lack of memories produces a sense of not belonging or a displacement from the place of origin that he desperately seeks to retain.

In fact, it is this insistence what Daniel uses as a key to enter the national polis of an Argentina that has closed its doors to him. Simón, which seems to be the voice of rationalization that wishes to erase the idealistic Argentina out of Daniel, insists all along the narrative that Daniel does not have a place in that national imaginary:

Con lo que te estoy diciendo que te has aceptado como argentino sin pensarlo más, a fact of life, y ahora me vienes con este casi proyecto de investigación que no sé qué te va a aclarar, quién eres tú, o quién era tu madre, o quién era tu padre, frankly, my dear, a estas alturas déjalo tranquilo, nunca vas a aclararlo todo, siempre te va a quedar una laguna por llenar, un hecho para el que no hay explicación, you’ll never get the whole picture because there’s no such thing, y mientras tanto yo me quedo ladrillando porque esta vez tú no quieres que te acompañe, porque en tu Argentina Revisited – dice, señalándome con el dedo con gesto teatral – yo estoy (hace una pausa dramática) de más. (30)

[What I’m trying to say is that you have accepted yourself as an Argentine without more hesitation, a fact of life, and now you come up with this research project that I doubt will ever clarify who are you, or who your mother warm or your father. Frankly, my dear, at this point of the game, just let it be. You will never clarify it all. There will always be some gap, something without explanation, you’ll never get the whole picture because there’s no such thing, and meanwhile I’m stuck here because you don’t want me there with you, because in your Argentina Revisited – he tells

139

me, pointing at me with a dramatic touch – I am (making a dramatic pause) uninvited.]

The insistence of entering a sort of lost paradise for Daniel provokes him to ignore

Simón’s voice while expanding his visit to Buenos Aires – as if his presence there would enable him to enter the “forbidden polis”, to be part of it. In that sense, the novel is about a nostalgic return to the past. The Greek epistemology of nostalgia refers to return to a place that was and cannot be. Returning to that nostos implies an impossible task, as it was well described by Homer in The Odyssey. El común olvido illustrates this impossibility by dismantling a sense of “being”, caused by the confrontation with the past. Therefore, once

Daniel uncovers the secrets of his mother, he decides to return to his home in New York.

According to Virginia C. Martin, Daniel’s voyage is translated in a person both arriving and leaving:

Daniel parte aún cuando llega, la partida se inscribe en él confirmando su vuelta, no puede llegar sin sospechar que partirá ineludiblemente. El estar en dos lugares pone a prueba el ser de alguno. (1)

[Daniel leaves even when he does not arrive, his departure is engraved on him confirming his return, he cannot arrive without knowing he will leave for sure. Being in between two places tests ones sense of being.]

The other life of Daniel challenges his sense of identity. He cannot be both. As a result, memory is the only link between the strange world (Buenos Aires) and Daniel, but at the same time, memory emphasizes his forbidden entrance to that world. Daniel cannot really enter this world because it is only represented though memory, a memory which has been erased and can only be represented, recreated by the characters that were witness of those moments. However, the past can never be relived because there is always a time discontinuity. In other words, the past that represents Argentina for Daniel can only be

140

achieved through representation and always from the present, which is the case of most of the novels I am working on in this chapter.

As it happens with the novel as an aesthetic representation itself, the representation of the past can only be attained through language. However, it is an interchangeable language, unable to provide any consistence to its testimony, as it depends on its continuous flow. In others words, if the past can only be represented by a sign, language in this case, then it will be in an uncertain or constant motion – a language that refuses to settle anywhere and that insists on transgressing its frontiers. That is the reason why the dual identity of Daniel is represented by an interchangeable language that jumps from Spanish to English or French in a same sentence, without any indentations that clarify the appropriation of a “foreign” language. Daniel would say; “Jumping from language to another without sutures, emphasis or style effect, without any reason, fascinates me: you know how it is, darling.”(“Me maravilla ese pasar de una lengua a otra sin suturas, sin

énfasis o efecto de estilo, sin aparente razón: you know how it is, che.”) That interchangeability of language underlines this character’s foreignness’ and the fact that, all the fragmentations of his personality, including the forgotten past, are an effort from this

“individual” to make sense of Argentina, now and then. At the same time, it is through language that Daniel tries to fill the gaps of his past, not only with the words that the other characters tell him, but also of the written language of both the diary and the letters.

4.2 The Polis through the Individual

La experiencia histórica traumática es inclusiva, entran también- por supuesto- los que la vieron pasar de lejos y, si acaso hubo alguno, los que no se enteraron de nada.

141

-Ángel Núñez

In El común olvido, memory (represented by language) and city are placed as crucial elements to achieve a sense of identity Daniel thought lost. These three elements, along with the secondary characters that live in present-day Buenos Aires, need to interact together in order to build the identity sought by Daniel. It is within this interaction that the novel assumes its political posture. Molloy’s novel is not only a novel about the search of a character to recover his lost identity, but also of the city itself. According to Virginia C.

Martin, “Singular memory has a plural, multiple and magnanimous contender. Daniel-

Memory versus Mother-Memories” (“La memoria singular tiene un contendiente plural, múltiple y hasta magnánimo. Daniel-memoria frente a madre-recuerdos […]”) (5).

However, I would go further: the act of remembering implies a plural counterpart not only in the mother and her remembrances, but also in the plurality of her memories, making a direct connection with “present” Argentina. In other words, the search of Daniel is both the search of an individual identity (lost at the moment he went to the United States) as well as the search of an Argentina that was and that can only be accessed from the present. The physical return of Daniel to Argentina and his desire to recover his singular memory implies facing the difference that his dead mother embodies, as well as facing the difference that also represents the absent city of Buenos Aires.

These symbolic connections between character and city are underlined when the car accident is revealed. The traumatic experience of the accident is only recovered by the revelation of Charlotte, though it was hinted before. This means that the event, which was crucial in Julia’s decision to leave, was erased from his memory, as well as that Buenos

Aires of his past to which he is now unable to return.

142

The shock of the accident is understood as a common consequence of trauma. In that sense, the lost history of Daniel also becomes the story of the lost history of the city.

In other words, in El común olvido, memory and history are related and to talk about

History as a macro-discourse, it is necessary to talk about all the individual histories coming together. History, like memory, is a plural voice. Therefore, the shock of individual trauma (Daniel, Charlotte, and so on) is a representation of the traumatic shock shared within the collective body of the community (Argentina), a traumatized body that becomes a macro-symbol.

The novel therefore responds to the discourses imposed from/for the polis, which are not limited in any way to the years of the military dictatorship. El común olvido surpasses that imposed silence going to a period of time before the repressive years. That revision becomes a political response even when it refuses that definition. In fact, Daniel talks about his mother’s decision of leaving from Argentina as a non-political action:

Mi madre, que se había ido de la Argentina por razones diversas que nunca me quedaron demasiado claras pero que de ningún modo eran políticas, se refugiaba, a la luz de los nuevos acontecimientos, como precursora. Te dabas cuenta de todo, supiste irte a tiempo, le decían, y a ella le resultaba difícil, por no decir imposible, resistir a la tentación de reescribir su pasado inmediato dándose otro lugar en la historia. Lo que había sido sobre todo éxodo personal se transformaba, halagadoramente, en un imperativo ideológico. En momentos que cedo a la tentación de juzgar a mi madre la veo como oportunista, como una suerte de groupies de la revolución, de cualquier revolución. En momentos más piadosos, la justifico: me digo que su reescritura de la historia no era simplemente un gesto vanidoso sino que respondía a una necesidad vital, la de dar cabida a su pasado argentino dentro de una perspectiva que sólo adquirió al irse. (58)

[My mother, who left Argentina for a number of reasons that were never clear but that were not politically motivated in any sense, posed as an exile pioneer in the light of events. You knew everything, you got out in time, they used to tell her, and it was difficult for her, to say the least, to resist the temptation of rewriting her immediate past, situating herself in another place in history. What it has been a personal exodus above all, was 143

transformed in a flattering ideological imperative. When I let myself to judge her I see her as an opportunist, as some sort of revolutionary groupies, of any revolution whatsoever. In other moments when I am feeling more compassionate, I justify her: I tell myself that her revision of the story was not a mere vain gesture, but that it responded to a vital need: to place her Argentine past into a perspective that was only achieved after leaving the country.]

Her self-motivated action acquires a political mantra after the fact, but also works as a way of achieving some sense of meaning to her departure in relation to her lost country.

However, Daniel’s need to name that past in relation to the political situation of

Argentina’s past places the novel as another response to the chaos of the later years, when both him and his mother were safe in the United States. The historical moment in time where Julia’s past takes place is the moment when Perón and his political influence were strong and in power, a movement and ideology that would be persecuted and censored after the coup of the last junta. This means that the novel represents a past that was persecuted and silenced, providing then for symbols as a tool to break that silence and fill the void with the representational tools of language. In fact, because it is narrated in the

“present-time” (the post-dictatorship), the novel stresses its importance of breaking that silence imposed by the military regime, to challenge it. It also underlines a need to challenge that past that meant to “bring order” within the polis while leaving a collective trauma.

The history represented in Molloy’s novel describes a nation that was divided as a result of different political struggles. Talking about the “Peronism” (the most important political movement in Argentina since the past century) and her school years, Beatriz says:

Yo escuchaba decir cosas en casa del tipo “Perón no sólo ha dividido al país, ha dividido a las familias argentinas”, en lo que se refiere a la mía parecía ser cierto, eran todos antiperonistas salvo un hermano de mi padre y se armaban unas peleas enormes […] (El común olvido, 258)

144

[I used to hear things in my house like “Perón hasn’t just divided the country, but he has divided the argentine families”. That was the case for my family, everybody was anti-Perón except for a brother of my father and they would have huge fights […] ]

The family is an important metaphor used later by Videla and the dictatorship as a national reference for Argentina. The argument that “Peronism” divided the Argentinean family implies that talking about the past means to talk about a divided nation. This reflection establishes a link with today’s Argentina, where “Peronism” remains to be the most powerful force in politics, used even by President Cristina Fernández de Kitchner.41

Political opponents of the actual administration still accuse it of dividing the nation, therefore dividing the “family”, as expressed in the novel.

The representation of the past and its influence within today’s political stratum is also expressed in Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara. Even when the plot is supposed to take place in 1992, the novel establishes a link with today’s Argentina right at the beginning of the novel when they are transferring the fake body of Tamerán to the cemetery:

¡Cómo no se va a ir al carajo el país con una mujer de presidente! Le digo, el viejo hijo de puta, ésta nos la hizo a propósito, para vengarse la hizo. Sabía que se iba a morir y nos largó duros con la yegua. (21)

[Of course the country is going to hell with a woman as President! I tell you, the old son of a bitch, he did that one on purpose, to have his vengeance. He knew he was going to die and he screwed us over with that idiot.]

41 The phenomenon is unique in Latin America, and it has changed political ideologies from time to time, beginning with Perón himself, who abandoned the Left movements in the seventies after they favored his returned from exile. To see more about the movement refer to José Pablo Feinmann and his published course on the topic (Peronismo. Filosofía política de una obstinación argentina, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/especiales/18-109422-2008-08-10.html)

145

The comment about a woman president, even when the social context has changed42, serves as a mirror with the political situation today.

Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara also represents the political turmoil of the years after Daniel’s departure from Argentina. As I mentioned before, Gamerro’s novel focus on the political turmoil that leads to the coup of 1976. The representation of the polis then becomes a representation of a political crisis, chaos and war, which was the argument that the military used to take over.

The importance of the world described in Gamerro’s novel lies in that it establishes a continuance from Molloy’s novel to his novel. The collective memory represented in the novels analyzed in this chapter focus in the years before the coup and the division within the polis of that historical period, to the political chaos of the sixties and seventies, and later to the dictatorship years in Dos veces junio.43 There is an insistence in all of these novels of using the quest of one character to symbolize the historical period of the polis during that historical period of time. In other words and as it happens in El común olvido, they use the personal history of a character to reflect on the plethora of voices that composed the polis then and that still shapes the contemporary polis today. In that sense, if there is a political response, it has to be represented as a de-negotiation. Since this de-

42 The driver refers to Perón and to his successor Isabel Perón. However, since the novel was published at the time when former President Nestor Kirschner died, leaving current President as the only choice in the party, the commentary about a femal President makes a resonance with Argentina today. In fact, it is ver common for cab drivers to complaint about the government today.

43 That’s the historical line developed within the novels examined. However, there are many other writers writing novels that aim to represent a forgotten history focusing on other historical periods, all part to a mistrust of the historic grand narratives that build the nation, a characteristic cherished by postmodernism according to Lyotard. Martín Kohan’s previous novels go on that direction (Cuentas pendientes, Segundos afuera, Los cautivos). Carlos Gamerro’s Las islas, on the other hand, explores the Falkland War. There are also important writers that have contributed to this discussion through literature. Ricardo Piglia leads the way, along with other writers like Manuel Puig and César Aira.

146

negotiation is represented within one character, it is meant to be a limited perspective that renounces any unilateral answers. Instead of that, there are only possible representations to be offered, possibilities to be reflected on and maybe reincorporated in the polis today.

4.3 Translating/Re-writing the Past

…to re-write or to re-present the past in fiction and in history is, in both cases, to open it up to the present, to prevent it from being conclusive and teleological. -Linda Hutcheon

The act of de-negotiation within the polis turns these characters into misplaced figures. As such, their agency in confined within the limits of that marginality. Ernesto is a businessman in the middle of a radical communist organization, the narrator in Dos veces junio is a military without conviction (on mandatory service), and María Teresa is a preceptor trying to figure out her role in the school while looking to gain Mr. Biasutto’s respect. In El común olvido Daniel feels misplaced since the beginning. He is an icon of the Argentine Diaspora, a situation shared all over the globe in Latin-America as well as a topic shared within different aesthetical representations.44 In Molloy’s novel this topic is examined with Daniel’s (and most of the characters in the novel) use of multiple languages, as well as by the two passports he has, even though he forgets to pick up the

44 There is an extensive canon of literature dealing with Diaspora in Continental America: Cuba, USA, Chile, Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico share an extensive literature dealing with the topic and the notion of displaced identity, especially during the second half of the past century. In Europe, marginal nations like Spain, United Kingdom, France, Greece and Italy illustrate an interest on the topic as well, which it is also the situation on marginal countries in Asia like Hong Kong, the Middle East, and so for.

147

Argentinean passport at the end as a result of the impossibility of returning that I have mentioned before.

Daniel’s situation with the “here and there”, living in two places, echoes the life of Molloy herself, who has been living in the United States for over thirty years. However, beyond the biographical information of the writers, what interests me most is that these misplaced figures establish a link with the role of the artist/writer within the polis. In other words, that misplacing is echoes the positioning of the artist in the polis. The artist is a figure who forms part of the plurality of the community (which he reproduces in his own work)45 but only as an outsider, a persistent idea that the western civilization inherits since romanticism.46 Even when that is not the case in Kohan’s work, he still uses main characters that are misplaced in their roles, even victims of their own actions. Both the narrator of Dos veces junio and María Teresa are trapped in the rationale of the dictatorship and, to a certain point, are just following orders. Molloy and Gamerro use characters that are related to the romantic figure, as they are involved with literature and aesthetics in general. Julia is a plastic artist, and both Daniel and Ernesto are vivid readers. In the case of Daniel, his reading is through translation: “I discovered that I had the ability to read in a different way. I could pay attention to the text written by another person because I felt I

45 The imitation of the world is what is commonly known as mimesis. According to Jacques Rancière, the mimetic effect was disrupted with the vanguards movements (Politics). For him, art is now inserted now into a tension between mimesis or break with reality, and the new language that it establishes. In the novels at hand, the artist is also an image of this tension between reproducing the world through the written world and the order establishes by the language manifested in the novels.

46 The ideologies predicated since Rousseau and that period placed the individual and his subjectivity as the most important aspect of the Western Civilization. In that sense, the artist were took a prophetic mantra, as he was the figure were passion and the sublime was transferred to. He was also an outsider. In that sense, the isolated figure of an artist is an inheritance of those ideals.

148

was re-writing it, making it mine.” (34) (“Descubrí que por fin podía leer de otra manera, podía prestar atención al texto de otro porque lo estaba reescribiendo, haciéndolo mío.”)

The act of translating implies then an action in the middle of the act of reading, which transforms it into writing.

The act of reading as an active instead of passive figure is not new. In fact, the reader has been a focus of debate since Post-structuralism and since Roland Barthes declared the “death of the author”, which Foucault echoed by declaring the author more as a function working throughout the text than as a person in the text.47 By taking the author outside of the equation, the importance lies in the text and in the act of the reader to create new texts based on his reading. The reader’s act of claiming the book as his own implies an act of placing himself as a subject-reader, with a specific role to perform. To read is to translate, to translate is to write, and to write is to claim the role of a subject-creator within the polis.

If translating implies to write then the writer’s task is really to re-write what it has been read. Given that the reader needs to make translation in order to understand (from sign to meaning), every reading implies a translation. The same can be understood about the act of writing, where the inverse act is applied (from meaning to sign). However, according to Gregorio Kaminsky, the act of writing implies a re-writing or at least to continue to write all that have been read or written before. (11) In other words, writing requires a translation. However, this translation goes beyond literature itself, which implies a re-writing (re-interpretation) of what have been said before. In that sense, if there is a

47 The canonical essays I refer are “The Death of the Author” of Roland Barthes, and “The Author Function” by Michel Foucault.

149

connection between these readers and the place of the artist (which is tied to his writing, in this case) within the polis, then their role in society signifies a re-writing.

As I have mentioned before, the novels at hand illustrate an insistence of re-telling the past, hence to re-write the past within fiction, to respond to what have been written as

History while using fictional characters to challenge those versions. Gamerro’s novel can be understood as a translation of the myth of Che or a re-writing of Che Guevara. That is precisely the reason why his main character is transformed from a businessman to a leader of a guerrilla movement with the name of the revolutionary leader and why he is able to read and translate the life of Che in front of the group:

El Che, en Cuba, había mandado a fusilar a algún que otro desertor, era cierto; sobre todo si desertaba con su arma y su parque, bienes preciosos de los cuales estaba privando a un compañero mejor dispuesto. Pero el Che, en Bolivia, continué con la voz vibrante de emoción, no había fusilado a nadie, ni siquiera a los chivatos del ejército, y tampoco en el Congo lo había hecho. (204)

[Che, in Cuba, executed more than one deserter, that was true; especially if he deserted his camp with his gun, precious goods that any other motivated partner could use. But in Bolivia, I continued with the voice trembling of excitement, Che didn’t execute a person, not even the military informants, and he didn’t do it in Congo either.]

Furthermore, Ernesto analyzes the change of Guevara in terms of meaning, from the implacable Che of Cuba, to his change in Bolivia:

En Bolivia el Che comprende que lo que convierte a la columna en un núcleo de acero es la solidaridad, la certeza de que nadie será abandonado, despreciado o humillado; que los fuertes sostendrán a los débiles hasta que se hagan fuertes y puedan sostener a los fuertes cuando flaqueen, o estén heridos, o se cansen meramente de ser los fuertes siempre. La ley de la columna guerrillera, descubre el Che en Bolivia, no es la ley del más fuerte sino la del más débil. (204-5)

[Che understood in Bolivia that what transforms the column into a steel nucleus is solidarity, the certainty that no one will be abandoned, spurned, or humiliated; that the strong men will carry the weak ones until they become strong and can hold the former when they flounder, or when they

150

are wounded, o they get tired of merely being the strong ones. The law of the guerrilla column, Che discovered in Bolivia, is not the law of the strongest but of the weakest one.]

It is the capacity of Marroné to read and translate (thus re-write) the myth of Che Guevara is what leads to his decoration as the new leader of the subdivision, replacing Miguel.

Moreover, the fact that the novel’s “deus-ex-machina” is the poster of Che implies, not only that the novel itself is motivated by the myth, translation and re-writing of Guevara, but that there would be a plurality of readings, one that leads to another so the cycle can begin again. Un yuppie en la columna of Che Guevara is as much a re-writing of

Che as a symbol, as well as re-writing of Marroné, the Che column, the “montoneros”, his son’s reverence to Guevara, and the fascination of the Left in Argentina and abroad with the Argentine leader. At the same time the novel works as a revision of Che in today’s globalized world and in Argentina, where many of the leftist groups seem to be still fixed on those ideals of the sixties and seventies that have not been successfully implemented.

Even the editorial house (Edhasa) cleverly used an image of Che in a teacup holder next to a black and white drawing of Mickey Mouse: to talk about Che nowadays is to talk about a

T-shirt to some extent. Therefore, the “deus-ex-machina” is the famous photo of Che in a sold poster.

Che as a commodity, however, does not escape the (intended) serious understanding of the ideals he believed in. The column of the Che was reading a printed book after all, which relates to the image of the poster and the contradictions of accepting

Guevara as an unquestioned ideal to follow really meant. In that sense, the novel closes reflecting on Che’s figure in the contemporary world and why Marroné thought that, beyond the picture (which links past and present once again with Marroné’s own picture posing as Che), it was a utopia: 151

El Che Guevara fue un hombre excepcional, qué duda cabe, pero en eso radica, justamente, la falla. Una sociedad como la que él propugnaba sólo podría funcionar si todos sus miembros, sin excepción, fueran el Che Guevara. Pero claro, ni siquiera él podía ser el Che todo el tiempo. Si a la mula humana le piden más de lo que puede dar, entonces se empaca y da menos. (406-7)

[Che Guevara was an exceptional man, no doubt, but that’s precisely his flaw. The society he advocated for could only work if all of his members were Che Guavara, no exceptions. But of course, not even himself could be Che all the time. If you ask more that it can give to the human mule, then he turns lazy and gives less.]

As a result, the novel also makes a critique to that Left that remains to be fixated in the projects of the past as if they were the only answer:

Muchos, todavía hoy, se preguntan por qué fracasamos. Algunos dicen que la misión que nos propusimos era muy superior a nuestras fuerzas, o a las de cualquier hombre, pero que aun así era nuestro deber morir en el intento. Yo tengo una respuesta más simple: en el fondo, no teníamos ninguna gana de triunfar, y menos de morirnos al pedo, y le hicimos un corte de mangas, al hombre nuevo. Porque, después de todo, decime, ¿quién querría participar en la construcción de un paraíso al que sería indigno de entrar? (407-8)

[There are a lot of people that ask why we failed, even today. Some say that the mission we were proposing was greater than our strengths, or than any man on that matter, but that even then we had to die trying. I had a simpler answer: underneath it all, we did not intended to triumph, and even less to die at that moment, so we took the highway and forgot about the new man. After all, tell me, who wanted to build a paradise that we were unworthy to enter?]

In that sense, the novel looks to the past to propose new readings, showing that to read

Che’s ways as the only answer, was to echo the discourse from the polis, where there was only one answer to accept. The critique comes in Marrone’s reflection on the cyanide pills every “montonero” was supposed to take if they were captured:

¿Cómo, en qué momento habían pasado, casi sin darse cuenta de que algo había cambiado, de la determinación de matar a los hijos de puta a la de matarse a ellos? ¿Estaban todos locos? Se suponía que la revolución se hacía cargándose a los fachos, no haciendo su trabajo por ellos. (300)

152

[When did they change, without knowing, from the determination of killing those sons of bitches to kill themselves? Were they all insane? Revolution was supposed to take place killing the fascist not making their own work.]

The structure, imitated in many ways the same regime it was opposing. In fact, Marroné is successful as a leader precisely because he is a business man who understands the logics of capitalism. This understanding is also represented in Tamerlán’s revision of the ideals that inspired the montoneros:

¿Para luchar por la libertad, la igualdad y la fraternidad crearon una organización más verticalista que el ejército, más moralista que la Iglesia y menos cuidadosa de la vida de sus miembros que la libre empresa? Vamos, muchachos, entre bomberos no nos pisemos la manguera. Ustedes lo que quieren es el poder. ¿Por qué no lo admiten de una vez y nos dejamos de tantas vueltas? (334)

[You created an organization even more vertical than the army, more moralist than the Church and less thorough of the lie of his members than the free market to fight for freedom, equality and brotherhood? Come on guys, don’t fool yourselves. You only want power. Why don’t you just admit it and stop kidding us around?]

Therefore both the capitalist model and the communist model of Guevara are equaled when positioned as one versus the other, making therefore a critique of the Left as well. In fact, the “montoneros’” belief on the revolution to come, a duplicate of Cuba’s revolution

(the fear of the militaries) becomes naive in face of revising the present:

Por la noche di una pequeña charla sobre el significado de nuestro primer combate, explicando que si bien se lo podía considerar una derrota en el plano estrictamente militar, era también una victoria política, ya que ahora el régimen no podía rehuir ocultando nuestra presencia, y la noticia de la existencia de un territorio liberado a las puertas mismas de Buenos Aires correría como reguero de pólvora y obraría como catalizador para la incorporación masiva del campesinado a nuestras filas. (217)

[I gave a little speech at night about the meaning of our first combat. I explained that, even when it could be perceived as a defeat in military terms, it was also a political victory since the regime could not hide their presence anymore and that the news of a free territory near Buenos Aires

153

would spread like powder and would work as a catalyst for the massive incorporation of the peasantry to our ranks.]

This perceived naiveté (given that both Marroné and the reader know that the revolution never came) implies a disconnection between the act of reading and acting. Reading implies an action between the frontiers of literature, which relies on the potential and actual writing of each reader. However, there is a disconnection between the role of art and artist with a direct or active agency. The interventions proposed in literature and other aesthetics representations are not to be merely accepted, but proposed and questioned.

Acting in the marginality assigned to the subject involved with aesthetics implies an alternative discourse, one that is limited to representational techniques. This does not mean aesthetics are less important than other kinds of actions within the polis (strikes, voting, and so on), but that they have an alternate “modus operandi”. Marroné, as well as the whole group of the Che column, were reading Che as the only counter argument to oppose the status quo of the government and its economical system. However, the action that literature offers is not absolute. Literature, as well as other manifestations that directly or indirectly respond to the polis, offer a de-negotiation, in other words, a negotiation within the polis that does not and cannot be imposed beyond a possibility. De-negotiation can only be achieved as a trial or proposal that is meant to be challenged, therefore re-written, as part of its organic cycle. That invitation to be questioned does not mean it cannot inspire ideas or other forms of active participation and/or resistance in the polis, but that it is meant to be one of many possibilities to reflect on the heterogeneous nature that the modern communities are supposed to have.

154

The name of Ernesto represents this plurality implied within the logics of aesthetics and the written word. In a way, Marroné tries to read Ernesto Guevara as others do, comparing himself to Che all the time and even trying to look physically like him:

¿Cómo se convierte un hombre en el Che Guevara? No basta, evidentemente, con interiorizarse de su vida, leer sus escritos, tratar de meterse en su mente. Eso es apenas copiarlo. Y el concepto clave, los propios escritos del Che lo enseñan, es no el de emulación: seguir su ejemplo no servil sino creativamente, desarrollar sus potencialidades inexploradas, aprender de sus errores y triunfar allí donde él había fracasado. No se trata de comprender al Che, sino de transformarse en él, de recoger el fusil donde él lo había dejado. (191-2)

[How can a man turn into Che Guevara? Evidently is not enough to embrace his life, read his writings, or try to get into his head. That is merely copying him. And the key is not emulation, even his own writings teach us that: follow his example not as a servant, but creatively, developing your unexplored potential, learn from mistakes and triumph where Che has failed. Is not about understanding Che, but to transform into him, to take the rifle where he has left it.]

Marroné was trying to look like Che in order to play his role in a Photo Film that the group was creating as part of that re-appropriation of the Guavara, to the point he is confused with Che himself by the peasants outside Buenos Aires. However, the similarity and confusion create a link with the act of translation and/or reading, as the understanding of

Marroné as Guevara would depend on who reads him as Che. Ernesto Marroné, as a symbol of a re-reading/re-writing, cannot be Ernesto Che Guevara, but only a translation of him, a reading of him, therefore, his double:

[…] era clarísimo lo que había pasado, o más bien lo que debía haber pasado y no pasó. El de las fotos no era el Che. Era yo. La única que guardaba algún parecido era la que me había sacado María Eva leyendo: justamente aquella en la que no estaba haciendo del Che, sino de mí mismo. (191)

[ […] it was more than clear what has happened, or better yet, what was supposed to happen and did not happen. The person in the pictures was not Che, it was me. The only picture where I looked like him was the one that

155

María Eva took of me when I was reading: precisely the one picture where I was not acting as Che, where I was just myself.]

To look like Che does not mean to be Che, but to re-write him, which it is precisely what

Marroné does. Marroné’s reading of Guevara echoes the character as a re-writing of Che, which, as I have mentioned earlier, situates him in the place of the artist.

However, if the act of reading establishes a connection with the role of the artist in the polis, every reader can be a possible artist/writer. Che Guevara takes the role of the text in the novel, which is what changes Marroné (as the reader) psychologically and physically. Che, as a text, promotes therefore a reproduction of his myth. The role of the artist within the modern polis promotes a multiplicity of Che or a plurality of voices that propose different readings of the idea, and in the case of the mythical figure, it is the counter culture’s icon.

4.4 Horror in the Cover Page

Plurality is the reason why Kohan does not use any implied artists or readers in his novels. If everyone has the potential to propose a counter argument to the discourses imposed and believed in the modern polis, then the act or reading of a fictional novel does not need writers in their narratives but, instead, people who are trapped within the discourses imposed of the political sphere. Since literary fiction is intended to be read

(starting the cycle all over again), it implies therefore a response and challenge within the polis.

Dos veces junio addresses that challenge by going a step further and using a nameless narrator as the main character. However, and I have mentioned earlier, the reader renounces to act, contrasting with the role of the reader as a potential writer. At the same

156

time, the victims presented along fiction are robbed of any possibility of action. Thus, Dos veces junio attempts to re-write the past by forming a narrative that examines the role of society when the “last military junta” was in power. The narrator’s compliance opens the plot of the novel as he is involved in the middle of a discussion about how to torture an

‘enemy’ and how young can one start torturing him. In fact, Dos veces junio begins with a simple question: “At which age can we begin to torture a child?” (11) (“¿A partir de qué edad se puede empezar a torturar un niño?”). To begin the novel with such a question immediately sets the violent tone of the narrative. The fact of considering when we can begin torturing a child aims to invoke the shock of the violent regime on different levels.

On the one hand, mentioning a ‘child’ when contemplating torture is a complete game changer. The importance of the question lies, not only in the possibility of torturing another human being, but in the uneasy position of being witness of such a violent act such as torturing a child, as if the act of torture or its consequences were not enough. The violent image that the question evokes puts its aesthetical representation at a level that, indirectly (always through art), tries to set the reader of the novel into the feeling of witnessing a torture, blending then the reader with the narrator’s voice and trying, therefore, to redefine his agency. In a sense, the novel opens by besieging the reader as an accomplice. Therefore, to read is to look at the symbolic presence of what is already absent. Idelber Avelar hints to that idea when he says that the past and its modern representation wait to be inserted in a metaphoric-substitutive operation (14). Hence, to look is an act of violence, not only in looking at a past that is already painful to look at, but in the act of being an imposition, a being forced to look at violence itself in its more crude and dehumanized form, without even daring to invoke it. Nonetheless, the imposition is

157

evoked only by the symbol as a passing-for, in other words, the sign as a domesticated imitation.

The act of ‘looking’ to a symbolic past is also moved by the appearance or sensation of being looked at. The character explains that his transgressive act of reading through the question awakens the sensation of feeling observed, which also provokes a sense of guiltiness:

Tal vez yo había obrado mal, y por eso me sentía observado. Era la impresión que me daba el sentido de culpa. Cuando uno obra mal se siente mirado, no importa cuán solo se encuentre. (15)

[Maybe I acted wrongly, and that is why I felt observed. That was the impression that provoked in me a sense of guilt. When we act wrongly we feel like we are being watched, it does not matter if you are alone.]

The desire to look back in Dos veces junio equals the uncomfortable feeling of being looked at in a closed society. In terms of that ‘nostalgic return’ (the painful journey to return ‘home’), the written word mimics the moment of trauma in the past, when the modern logics of looking in order to discipline shaped the politics employed by the junta.

According to Foucault, that modern logic or what he calls ‘hierarchical observation’ provides an instrument for discipline and coercion. To observe is an instrument of intimidation and the dictatorship adhered to those principles.48 For the junta, in order to repress the “demos”49, the state needed to enforce a repressive and powerful look and control its citizens. In search of the “subversive”, which represented a threat to the regime

48 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment, trans. by Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 35-169.

49 Jacques Rancière describes this term as the people within the polis who did not have a right to act and/or to govern. He underlines that, in Classical Greece, to be part of the demos meant to not count.

158

and order, everybody was a suspect, a possible terrorist, blending subject and suspect into one menacing figure to look upon first, and then conceal. The symbolic image of an open notebook (where the question was written), the presence/identity of the child, the act of torturing him, and the guilt provoked by that sensation of being looked at, serve as “deus ex machine”, not only to the story, but to the response of art to that political situation, which still influences how Argentinean society behaves politically. The fact that the narrator expresses a sensation of guilt serves as a parallel, not to the writer or his generation, but to the ‘nostalgic’ revision – as if that guilt underlines the necessity of talking about what was silenced before.

The same intent of “look to repress” is what Mr. Biassutto tries to enforce in

Ciencias morales. However, in the case of that novel, the school is the space that represents the controlled system embodied in Dos veces junio. At the same time, the discourse of order and its necessary controlling gaze are proposed as a project to perpetuate the logics established by the regime. In other words, the infant body is to be traumatized, not by torture, but by inserting an ideology inside their way of living (inspired by terror), so they continue to behave as if they were observed and fearing authority for the rest of their lives.

In terms of the mimetic representation of the novels and beyond the early sensation of the narrator in Dos veces junio, the exhaustive look of the regime is translated into a lack of looking by the rest of the polis. Here we have the depiction of a society that does not want to see, does not want to question, and therefore, in contrast with the State, does not want to know. Ciencias morales represents this society by using the school as a world detached from the outside world, as expressed right from the beginning by the vice-rector:

159

Allí afuera, quiero decir en la calle, se verifica algún desorden en estos momentos. Nada que deba y nada que nos obligue a interrumpir el normal dictado de las clases. Pero hasta tanto las autoridades logren restablecer el orden, lo que se hará a la mayor brevedad, es preciso adoptar algunas medidas de prevención aquí en el colegio. Debo decirles que hemos tenido que cerrar las puertas del edificio […] (31)

[There is disorder outside in the streets. It’s nothing that should or will make us interrupt classes. However, until the authorities bring things back to normal, what will be done as soon as possible, we need to take some precautions. I must inform you that we closed the doors of the building […]]

His instructions were complete with the information about which exits students should

take to avoid “Plaza de Mayo”. The avenue was the meeting site for people expressing

their discontent with the regime and the war, discontent that was rapidly growing up. As

such, the vice-rector underlines the importance of isolating the students from any contact

with what was clearly an opposition to the government, therefore, to authority, as though

the school were a bubble separated from the realities of the nation: the impending war

with England for the Falkland Islands, the ordinary life of people that had to obey

authority like María Teresa, and the letters of his brother who, as the narrator in Dos

veces junio, was serving his mandatory year in the military.

Dos veces junio use sports to represent the disconnection between the public discussion and the results of those politics. The World Cup of 1978 represents the maximum symbol of that social disconnection with the ‘war underneath’. It was during that sporting event that the whole nation was more distracted from the oppressive hand of the government and from people disappearing. The novel depicts the night when Argentina lost to Italy as a desolate night, where the whole country stopped to watch the game. Even the narrator who is waiting for Dr. Mesiano to finish watching the game tries to know about the results on the street and radio, while there is a girl crying and running desperate

160

on the streets, only to disappear into the shadows. It is also during that wait when the main character finds a ring on the floor, underlining his desire to ignore any micro-story behind the spectacle of the game:

[...] un anillo. Un anillo dorado con una letra ‘R’ tallada en el anverso […] Y en el borde interior, en una letra tan pequeña que apenas si alcancé a leerla bajo la pobre luz de la calle, decía: ‘Raúl y Susana’, y un año: ‘1973’. […] al anillo, no sé por qué, lo tiré en el arenero de la plaza y después lo tapé a patadas con arena, primero lo tapé y después revolví todo con mis botas de soldado, hasta estar bien seguro de que no podría volver a encontrar ese anillo […]. (63)

[ […] a ring. It was a golden ring with the letter ‘R’ engraved on the back […] And on the edge, written on a font so small that I barely got to read it under the dim light of the street, it said: ‘Raúl and Susana’, and a year: ‘1973’. […] I don’t know why I threw the ring into the square’s dust and I covered it, tapping along with my soldier boots, until I was sure that I would never find that ring again […] ]

These moments of “looking the other way” serves as a parallel to the story of the tortured body of the mother. In fact, it is in her encounter with the narrator that the novel finds its climatic moment and where there is an emphasis on the main character’s resolution of not doing anything challenging the political order. As such, her encounter is about divulging the Argentina beneath the surface, to reveal the horror:

Ella empezó a contar las cosas que estaban pasando […]. La voz ronca me fue diciendo cada cosa que le habían hecho. En un momento no quise escuchar más y le dije: ‘Callate, vos. Callate la boca’. Pero no me moví. No me moví porque si me movía capaz que sentía el tirón en el pulóver, de ella que me agarraba […].Yo no me moví y ella siguió hablando. (137)

[She started to narrate the things that were happening […] Her hoarse voice was telling me each thing that was done to her. After a while I could not hear anymore and I said: ‘Shut up! Shut your mouth!”’ But I did not move. I did not move because maybe if I moved I would feel her pulling me by the pullover, I would feel trying to get a hold on me […] I did not move and she kept talking.]

The narrator’s desire of remaining deft responds to a complete obedience to the law. His submission followed his father’s advice (an echo of authority), at the beginning of the

161

novel, of not questioning anything. Authority, therefore, comes from the regime and is not to be challenged. These logics also follow a similar pattern of how the polis was organized for the Greeks. Rancière reminds us that there were clear divisions within the Greek polis.

According to the philosopher, there was “a particular disposition to act that is exercised upon a particular disposition to ‘be acted upon’” (Dissensus 40). The people (“demos”) who did not have the right to act needed to know their place, follow those who had the power to act (“arkhêin”), and remain silent. Both the narrator in Dos veces junio, as well as

María Teresa in Ciencias morales, behave similarly within the modern polis by following orders, remaining silent, and knowing their place. For both characters the law needs to be proclaimed by those with the authority to proclaim it, in other words, Dr. Messiano and

Mr. Biasutto. This means that the law is at the same level as authority, which can then be forced upon the subject. This forced homogeneity under the pretext of law is permitted in contemporary politics with what Agamben categorizes as a state of exception, which declares an atypical empty space of force of law without law. (State of Exception 99) This means that what is supposed to be protected under the law ceases to apply and the acts unrecognized by law are imposed by force and recognized by authority. In other words, the state of exception can be seen as an empty space that excludes all rights granted by law without renouncing the law itself or its authority within the polis. That suspension is always justified by an external threat (state of necessity) that habilitates a state of war. It is in that direction that violence is justified by the polis and it is in those terms that it is justified in the novel by Sergeant Torres:

Dijo el sargento que las cosas había que hacerlas con la mayor responsabilidad, que en los días que corrían los errores se pagaban muy caro; dijo que el enemigo estaba esperando cualquier distracción nuestra

162

para golpear, y que en tiempos de guerra era imprescindible afrontar cada hecho con absoluta seriedad. (35)

[The sergeant said that things had to be done with the most sense of responsibility, that mistakes were not affordable these days; he said the enemy was waiting for any distraction on our part to strike, and that in times of war it was essential to face every task with absolute seriousness.]

The state of exception was then justified to pursue a national redefinition based, like all dictatorships, on a closed, authoritarian and homogeneous government.50 The “enemy” in this case was the citizen opposing the government, which immediately excludes him of his rights and of the polis. In fact, he is proclaimed an enemy of the state because there is the necessity of a threat that justifies the state of exception and the war within the nation.

Following Carl Von Clausewitz and developing her thoughts on violence, Hannah Arendt establishes that ‘”war is the continuation of politics by other means” (On Violence 9). In that sense, the state of exception not only justifies the suspension of law against an invisible threat – that of war or ‘the Dirty War’, as it was called – but imposes itself through that cycle (politics-state of necessity-state of exception-war-politics). In other words, the law is “suspended” with the justification of war that, at the same time, consolidates the authority who proclaimed the suspension in the first place. War also expands the political interest of the regime that was to facilitate the developing of the neoliberal project in the Southern Cone.

50 This does not mean that the state of exception equals a dictatorship. In fact, Agamben is clear in stressing that one is not a synonym of the other and that the latter can be replaced by the state of exception. However, the state of exception has been the paradigm of contemporary dictatorships, allowing them to exclude all rights guaranteed by law to a group of citizens and establishing an extreme disciplinary state for the rest of the citizens, so they can return to the polis and be protected by the state, as defined by the authoritarian apparatus.

163

The dismantling of the national discourse allows an interaction between the imagined community and the space of aesthetics. In other words, not only is art always political because it deals with the modern polis, but the imaginary of the nation is also created and conceived (like art) and even when it represents and responds to the political or public realities of a community, it works on a symbolic level. The nation itself is a creation, used to artificially “unite” the people.51 As I have mentioned, that symbolic reality is imposed by force and in a unilateral direction in both Ciencias morales and even more explicitly in Dos veces junio – all justified politically by the threat of ‘war’. In other words, the national construction meant a constant aggression from the State to its

(infantilized) citizens. The symbol, therefore, becomes real through politics, defining that term as the actions of the political authority, which in Argentina meant affecting and ending the lives of thousands of people. The reality of that symbol is confirmed within these novels through the representation of what is considered dear to the national identity of Argentina: the flag, the ‘salute to the flag’ (which invokes at the same time the flag and national pride), the Falkland Islands and the sport of soccer.

That definition of the Argentinean community and their reassurance as national representations by the “National Reorganization Process”52 can be traced even today.

National pride remains strongly appreciated by Argentineans, especially after their last economic crisis in 2001. In fact, the use of flags, so well described in Dos veces junio for

51 The idea of a nation as something imagined was first introduced by Benedict Anderson. Ascribing to that idea we can think of the nation as artifice, something imagined and created. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 3rd edn (London: Verso, 2006).

52 The name the military junta gave to their politics.

164

the national holidays and/or world sport soccer events, remains a popular custom. Today, in commemoration of their two-hundredth anniversary, thousands of Argentineans hang the national flags from their windows or balconies. At the same time, soccer and specially the World Cup, as in many other countries of Europe and Latin America, is so revered that the whole country stops during these events. The Falkland Islands is also an important topic and most Argentineans believe they are part of their territory. Even today’s President

Fernández de Kirchner has demanded in the UN that the islands sovereignty is released from the United Kingdom and returned to Argentina. In other words, those elements used by the regime to distract the people were powerful enough to achieve that intention and continue to be so even today. Their aesthetical representation serves as a link to connect the silenced past with the present, working therefore as a reflection tool of how the national imaginary and the discourses within the polis are built today. In that sense the representational symbol takes place of an absence (of sense) and gives meaning, becoming then a reality within the collective identity or the idea of the national.

In Argentina, that understanding has surpassed the mere elements of the spectacle.

The nation is more than a flag, even though those elements are very much alive. Instead, the idea of a national identity is used as an ongoing project where the nation is understood as a visible space to work together. Usually, every time the idea of the nation is invoked it is in order to move certain politics forward for the common group of that community known as Argentina, economically, resourcefully, and so on. That redefinition of mere symbols, as used by the junta, has reshaped the understanding of politics, which is also an ongoing process in which the people are directly involved, especially in the past decade.

Every little issue is reason enough to go to the streets and manifest in numbers. Along

165

these manifestations there are different forms of aesthetics going hand in hand with the expressions in the street, in order to pressure those in charge. Music (“batucadas”53), signs, popular songs and graffiti are necessary instruments for those manifestations. It is a situation approximating the idea of Antonio Negri that, under the new conditions of capitalism – which implies a relationship in constant negotiation with the worker and his intelligence – the subject (multitude) opens his relationship with the sovereign (Diálogo,

48). In other words, to be part of the community is to be able to interweave the relationships of power. In fact, Negri comments that this political agency is noticeable in

Argentina. The end of the dictatorship, the lack of trust with the elected leaders after that, and the complexities of a global world that was not helping the specific situation of the country, only reshaped the dynamics and understanding of the nation. As a result, the

“demos” have been actively inserted in the polis and art (or aesthetics) is one of the devices to negotiate within that polis.

At the same time, this political awareness is reflected in other artistic manifestations such as literature, forming a continuum between art and the polis. On the one hand, the revision proposed by art and the texts at hand are a reflection of a collective psyche. On the other hand, art reinserts that awareness and promotes the discussion by its exposition within the polis. This indicates that aesthetics seem to balance between being a reflection of a specific community and a popular instrument to resist any form of imposition from those in charge and the community. In any instance, artistic expressions

53 “Batucadas” comes from Brazil and they are a popular expression of music consisting mostly on percussion. The instruments vary, but the rhythm, which derives from samba, is repetitive. They are commonly used in popular manifestations all over the Southern Cone.

166

refuse to settle by any imposition from those with political authority. In fact, it is always a response from a subjectivity that takes a direct role within the polis, claiming a place inside that collective imaginary.

The space that art demands for itself within the polis insists therefore on the inclusion of different possibilities for the reactions it wants to provoke, opening possibilities for other considerations that draw from the inventive of fictional representation. This is precisely how Dos veces junio reproduces the discussion of the disappeared: from fictional narratives that attempt to represent those voices or, in this case, bodies, which were ousted from that collective body (of the nation). These bodies are presented as tools of information. The detainee is then just something to dispose of, a number to extract information. The transgressive act starts by dehumanizing the prisoner, robbing all sense of identity to make them empty bodies or ‘casualties of war’. In fact, talking about people captured ‘in war’, Doctor Masiano says: “[…] in a war the bodies cease to belong to anybody: they are pure surrender, pure giving in […] when war acts against a body, it’s acting over something that belongs to nobody.” (120) [“[…] en una guerra los cuerpos ya tampoco son de nadie: son pura entrega, son puro darse […] cuando en la guerra se acciona sobre un cuerpo, se está accionando sobre algo que ya no le pertenece a nadie.”] The insistence on this non-body in both texts follows the modern logics described by Foucault. In the case of an oppressive government in a state of exception, these logics become perverse (which is how they also evolve in Ciencias naturales). In the hole of the state of exception, the detainee ceases being a citizen; it does not belong to the national polis anymore, and therefore, is erased from all public life. That ousting echoes the image of the “Homo sacer” of Agamben, which was a political body

167

who could be killed but not sacrificed, implying a sense of outlaw within the structure of society. In Dos veces junio the body is discarded by the state (a non-citizen) and reclaimed by the state, transforming him to a tool of information. In fact, the woman that is a detainee along the novel is insulted – called as a “dog” or a “slut” – as a way to deny her the name.

In other words, emptying the subject from his identity or what makes her human.

4.5 To Infinity and Beyond! Surpassing National Frontiers through Language

The identity’s nullification connects the novel with El común olvido. The dehumanization of the victims in the novel establishes a connection with Daniel’s disrupted identity on Molloy’s work, though the effect of Kohan’s novel is more dramatic and directly connected with the traumatic events that occurred in the dictatorship. The connection lies just at the level of understanding identity, who understands it and how.

However, both novels are immersed within the representational logics of aesthetics. They are objects representing subjectivities in a common place.

These representations are not limited to national frontiers. In fact, every one of these novels establish connections that go beyond the specificities of Argentina, even when the plot is situated during the years of the “last junta”, as it is the case with both Kohan’s novels. However, the scheme of an alleged constant gaze as a way of control shares the same rationalization of modern western civilization and of dictatorships all over the world, from Chile and the rest of the Southern Cone, to the first dictatorship of the twentieth century for the Hispanic world: that of Franco’s Spain. In fact, the same reasoning is implicit in the republican governments of Colombia and other countries that follow the

168

model of the United States and Europe.54 In terms of Dos veces junio, the necessity to revise the past and the atrocities of the dictatorship surpass the World Cup of 1978 and establish links with the rest of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone where the disappearing of people was something that the government did every day. The disappeared and tortured are familiar themes (although for different political realities) even in other countries of Latin America, like Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico. At the same time, the incidence of stolen children is a familiar topic in the rest of the Southern Cone and even in

Spain, where this experience has been a recent topic to explore, especially within literature and other artistic manifestations.

Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara also establishes connections that surpass the national frontiers. Even when the novel is about the radical group

“montoneros”, the fascination with Guevara and his influence on the radical groups in

South America is not specific to Argentina. At the same time, the re-reading of Che’s life and the celebration of the revolutionary triumph in Cuba (the only one to succeed in Latin

America) cherish a bond with Cuba and the communist regime of Castro.

However, the surpassing of national frontiers is more evident within the plot of El común olvido and the character of Daniel, which as I have mentioned earlier, is both an

American citizen as well as an Argentine citizen (even though he leaves his Argentine passport at the end). He represents a complicated figure, where he seems to inherit his

54 The camera and its capacity for recording has been the logic conclusion of this kind of reasoning once the technological advances were achieved. The explanation behind the camera in a neoliberal system is well represented in Eltit’s Mano de obra, as discussed on chapter 2. Eltit’s novel is therefore an example of how the specificities shared in the Argentinean texts establish connections with Chile, the Southern Cone, and all over Western Civilization.

169

mother’s cosmopolitanism while interpreting his “lost home” as what many consider to be a transnational experience. According to Bruce Robbins:

[…] cosmopolitanism has often seemed to claim universality by virtue of its independence, its detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives […] many voices now insist […] that the term should be extended to transnational experiences that are particular rather than universal and that are unprivileged-indeed, often coerced (Cosmopolitics, 1)

Daniel cherishes that transnational experience as he tries to grasp Argentina from his particular understanding, while been a “coerced” figure in terms of his sexual orientation.

However, his independence and capacity of getting rid of his bonds (Simon) and commitments do not place the character as an “unprivileged” character (especially with the way of life he can sustain all over the novel).

Nevertheless, the character’s duality and his multiple languages underline a dynamic and capacity of surpassing frontiers. If it is true that, as I mentioned before, the duality of citizenships are presented as cracks within his personality and sense of identity, his exchangeable idiom and the facility of how he moves between one language to another in a same sentence are examples of a constant exchange between cultures and languages.

However, the three languages spoken in the novel are Spanish, English and French, sharing the “universalist” understanding of cosmopolitanism that is defined to be a phenomenon within dominant and European cultures and languages. In fact, most of Molloy’s novel deals with the dynamic of foreignness versus cosmopolitanism, in other words, the question of belonging.

The question of belonging (to a specific nation) is also de-negotiated in these novels. On the one hand the texts under analysis intent to respond to the national polis of

Argentina. In other words, even when they establish connections that go beyond those

170

national limitations, they mostly refer to the specific events of the Argentine nation and reflect on the issues inherited from their dictatorship. On the other hand, they are books to be consumed, commodities that are not that much different from that poster of Che in

Marroné’s teenager son’s room. In that sense, they are commodities that can only react to the polis by inserting within the post-capitalist logics’ of the market on a global scale.

These novels are submerged then into a debate of responding and offering new readings to the old discourses disseminated within the polis while having to be part of the logics that shape that same polis. Those dynamics are not specific to Argentina, as we have seen in the previous chapters, and are characteristic of an economical system cherished all over the globe. This means that these books and their role are immersed into another level of de-negotiation, meaning: that of inserting itself within the dynamics of the local

(Argentina) while renouncing to that specific place. Instead, these novels enjoy mobility from their limited role within the specific national polis they address to the broader tensions of the global – with all the complexities that these pretentions bring – specially, in terms of being a product (than in narrative terms). In other words, there are immersed in the dynamic tensions of the local versus the global, the particular versus the universal, which has been a constant tension within modern literature.

In the case of the novels at hand, publishing houses from Spain have published all of them. This implies a broader audience while, at the same time, inserts the novels (and authors) in a transnational net where the book is another commodity. Martín Kohan’s novels, for example, enjoy more potential for distribution because his novels are published by Anagrama, a Spanish editorial house that has been successful in publishing new talented writers from Spain and Latin America and has been very aggressive in terms of

171

establishing distribution. As a result, the author enjoys a visible presence as a new

Argentine writer with a vast work already published. In fact, Anagrama is one of the publishing houses responsible for canonizing Latin American writers since the nineties.

Most of the writers that are not recognized by Spanish editorial houses are vastly unknown in Latin America and sometimes even in their own countries. They are also non-existent to academics from the United States, as it is very difficult to import these books. However, the broader exposition that Anagrama brings to Kohan has enabled a number of translations in French, English and German. The bigger the audience, the more chances it gets to be translated by someone attracted to the novel.

In that sense, literature needs to be part of the economic system to increase its reach to a bigger number of people. At the same time and in the case of Latin American writers, their novels have a better chance to achieve a broader audience once they are recognized in Spain. This implies forming part of the process García Canclini calls as

Hispanoamericanization or “the expanding ownership of publishing houses, airlines, banks, and telecommunications by Spanish companies in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,

Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela” (xxxvi). In other words, literature has to be also

“owned” by Spain in a sense, in order to achieve a broader recognition. The importance of that recognition is that, to create awareness or propose new readings to the discourses imposed within the polis, literature needs a plurality of readers that translate their own meaning of the novel. In that sense, the novel presents itself both as a response to the economical and political system, as well as an item with a target audience, like any other commodity. That intended audience also captures a duality between being a “homogeneous audience”, which can be targeted by publicity strategies, and the plurality of voices that

172

aesthetics represents and that are symbolized within these novels. Therefore, the economical aspect of literature situates it as an artistic expression in the middle of a series of tensions between what intends to do and its role as an material object, a relationship that is not limited to the author and their books, but that extends to the readers (those potential writers), the businessman that decide what is going to be published or not, and the publishing houses that place an author in major circulation. As a result, literature has to deal one way or another with the economical system established all over the globe. In terms of that economical system, which defines politics in the Western Civilization and the most advanced countries, literature is displaced to a minor role within that system while remaining to be part in it. It is from these dynamics that literature can propose new readings to what has happened under extreme governments and how they affected specific nations like Argentina in recent years.

173

CHAPTER 5:

OBSSESIVE LOOKS: CINEMATIC REPRESENTATIONS OF A COLLECTIVE

TRAUMA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

Acaso, a falta de respuestas sociales, lo que el Nuevo Cine Argentino esté intentando generar sean respuestas artísticas a la crisis. -Diego Lerer

…el horror real es fuente de impotencia …Pero el horror reflejado, reconducido, reconstruido como imagen puede ser fuente de conocimiento. -Didi Huberman

El artista siempre está en crisis porque producir cine genera ese estado, aquí y en cualquier parte del mundo. Y claro está que siempre que se hable de producción cinematográfica también se estará hablando de economía y es ahí donde la realidad se cuela y vuelve a surgir la crisis pero desde otro lugar. Soy director de cine, soy un tipo en crisis, son un crítico de mi sociedad porque estoy en crisis. -Gustavo Postiglione

El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, 2009) is a contemporary attempt to represent the oppressive past of Argentina within film media. It is also the most successful film dealing with the dictatorship since La historia oficial (The Official Story,

1985), and it was selected to represent Argentina in the “Best Foreign Language” category of the Academy Awards, receiving the honors. An hybrid, El secreto de sus ojos combines different film genres (drama, comedy, love film, political film, detective film) to tell the story of Benjamín Esposito (Ricardo Darín), a retired counselor in love with 174

judge Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil) who is trying to write a novel about the events that led to his exile from Buenos Aires during the years previous to the last dictatorship.

The film begins with Benjamín visiting Irene’s office, where he asks details about that time. Cutting to a representation of those days, the movie focuses on the murder of

Liliana Coloto (Carla Quevedo). The “Morales case”, as it was called, was a criminal investigation in which both Esposito and Menéndez worked together. Over the investigation, Esposito defies the conclusions of his coworker Romano (Mariano

Argento), arguing that he found a strange man looking obsessively to Liliana in all their pictures from their school years, back in the rural town of Chivilcoy. His thesis shapes the investigation, a hunch based on Benjamín’s own secret feelings for Irene. It is also that hunch which leads him to pursue, find and prove that it was indeed the young man, named Isidoro Gómez (Javier Godino), who raped and murdered Liliana in that June of

1974, where political turmoil was dividing the country. In other words, it was love that made Benjamín recognized the criminal filled with nothing but desire.

However, the same political turmoil of the country led to the exoneration of

Isidoro, who is presented right besides Isabel Perón on the television news (presumably working for the Triple-A). Isidoro’s release led to yet another confrontation between

Benjamín and Romano who was behind the criminal’s exoneration. During the confrontation it becomes clear that Esposito’s life was in danger. Irene convinces him to escape, leaving behind his assistant, friend and “comic relief” of the film, Pablo Sandoval

(Guillermo Francella), who the film suggests was later murdered while waiting for his friend at his house.

175

The novel that Benjamin tries to write becomes the tool to link the past with the present and to recover what was not said and/or was forgotten. The climax comes when

Benjamin finds Ricardo Morales (Pablo Rago) – Liliana’s ex-husband – living an isolated life while keeping Isidoro in jail and alive but without any human interaction besides feeding him. With the imprisonment, Ricardo believes to be fulfilling the legal justice of life confinement. His vengeance leads Esposito to go back to Irene and finally declare his secret love.

Marco Bechi’s Garage Olimpo (1999), builds an aesthetic language within visual representation which appears to take place in 1978.55 During that year, María (Antonella

Costa), a teacher of poor neighborhoods and presumably (although not explicitly) a member of a radical group, is kidnapped from her mother’s house and is sent to what appears to be “El Olimpo”, one of the detention centers functioning at the time. There, the film turns into a violent depiction of torture, not only of María, but of all the other detainees that keep arriving during the course of the film’s narrative. In that sense, the film is darker than El secreto de sus ojos and does not attempt to play with different genres in order to represent the crimes committed in Argentina. In fact, the movie is a lineal representation of torture, from the moment they kidnap her, to the moment they kill her. Besides María’s situation, the other plots in the film are mainly about other people in

55 Even though Garage Olimpo is a representation of the violence and abuse of power committed during any given point of the military dictatorship (the film even ends with some general statistics about the victims of the regime), the film’s plot could have taken place in the specific year of 1978. The name of the movie makes reference to El Olimpo, a clandestine center of detention that existed in Buenos Aires. The center operated between August 1978 and January 1979, opening a window for the plot to be set in 1978- 1979.

176

“El Olimpo”, the attitude of the torturers and the military, the constant desperate search of Diane – María’s mother – (Dominique Sanda), and the story of Felix (Carlos

Echevarría), who used to sublet a room in the old house of Diane. His story is the closest we get to any love story in the film, though it is represented from the beginning as a dark obsession more than anything else, not that different from Isodoro’s obsession in El secreto de sus ojos. Felix’s obsession is the reason to extend María’s life inside the detention center. However, he is unable to save her at the end, as he turns his back to her when she was been taken to the truck. At that moment, he realizes that he is a mere soldier and that he is unable to satisfy his desires in a world of order and discipline modeled by the military. At the same time, the Medium-Shot of Felix’s back through the glass window becomes an emblematic symbol of the stance that many people took under power and concerning the victims of the dictatorship.

The same excessive model of order and discipline is represented in Diego

Lehrman’s La mirada invisible (The Invisible Eye, 2010). Based on Kohan’s novel

Ciencias Morales (School for Patriots), Lehrman’s focuses on the private and elite school of “Moral Sciences” in Buenos Aires during the last days of the dictatorship. The same characters are at play: mainly, new classroom assistant Marita and her supervisor

Biasutto. Biasutto represents the supreme law inside the school while the assistants and students are forced to follow it or pay the consequences. However, as in the novel, Marita becomes obsessed with the supervising task, and becomes engulfed in the same situation: spying inside the boys bathrooms with the excuse of catching students who were smoking. The obsessive supervision becomes a perverse play of desires, which ends in

177

the climatic rape scene of Marita in the boy’s restroom by Biasutto.56 However, in this moment of the film she stabs him in the same location where he raped her so that she can have some sort of revenge while attempting to regain a sense of dignity. Outside the school’s walls, the dictatorship was about to end after Argentina’s defeat in the Falkland

War, represented in the film with the declaration of war to the United Kingdom by

Leopoldo Galtieri, fourth president of the last junta (1981-1982).

The desire to fight back, which is not directly represented in Garage Olimpo

(where any attempt of resistance was broken) or in El secreto de sus ojos, is what motivates Nicolás Capelli’s Matar a Videla (Kill Videla, 2010). The film narrates the desire of Julián (Diego Mesaglío), who recently decided to disconnect from his previous life. He quits his job in telemarketing and ends the relationship with his two-year girlfriend, Lucía (Eilia Attías). Unable to find any place in contemporary argentine society, he concludes that the uniqueness of the Argentinean polis is the pain of the past, and that pain or scar is represented in the life of Jorge Videla. As a result, he buys a gun and starts to stalk Videla’s house, while meditating about the sense of justice that such an act will bring, as well as the sense of accomplishment in terms of his own individual life.

The murder of Videla becomes his reason to live. The film slows up the arrival of that moment, focusing instead on his common and methodological routines, which always start with the sound of the alarm at 7:00 AM, even when he is not employed anymore. At the same time, his visits to church to confess his intentions stress the film’s objective of

56 Contrasting with the novel, the movie presents one rape scene as the climax, while the novel presents a repetition of rapes to subdue Marita into the victim’s role, who was powerless against the systematic model used by the militaries and their allies of the far-right.

178

reflecting on what kind of justice would be involved in killing Videla, expounding in its moral, ethical and religious implications.

However, Julián never gets to murder the former dictator. The day he was on his way to kill him, the character discovers that Videla died of natural causes that same morning. Videla’s death leaves Julián, again, without a sense of purpose or fulfillment, without a sense of closing the wound. The last sequence of the film focuses on him running without any particular direction, while Lucía seems to be chasing him to tell him that she is pregnant. His alienation leads him to the train station where it is not clear if he kills himself (fulfilling the film’s first Voice-Over of “I’m a dead man” [“Yo soy un hombre muerto”]) or not.

Matar a Videla is as much about the symbol of that traumatic past as of the present of a society which seems to have lost any sense of direction after the oppressive government of the military junta. The trauma still shapes Argentina despite the over thirty years that have already passed. In that sense it underlines the political consequences of the dictatorship, which, as it happens in Chile and most of Latin America, ended with the implementation of a neoliberal system that affected the country.57

Lugares comunes (Common Ground, 2002) also deals with the effects of the neoliberal system in a country that has suffered a series of crises as a result of this economic theory. Directed by Adolfo Aristarain, the film focuses on the last days of

57 However, the panorama has been changing in the past fifteen years with the revival of populist parties and candidates. With the exception of Colombia in the north of the continent, most of South America has been electing presidents associated with leftist coalitions and the mobilization of masses with the use of an antagonism with capitalism and/or the United States. However, in the case of Argentina and of Chile’s last president – associated with the far-right – the policies imposed by their respective governments remain to follow the capitalist model, which is what the film wants to address.

179

leftist literature professor Fernando Robles (Federico Luppi) after he is forced to retire. It is 2001 and Argentina suffers the last economical debacle, disabling Professor Robles from getting a new job in Buenos Aires. As a result, his wife Liliana (Mercedes

Sampietro), decides to sell the apartment and buy a small farm in order to escape the high costs of living in the city. There, the movie turns into a late “coming-of-age” story where the couple learns to redefine their lives in the country and even produce their own goods.

The film ends up inviting a redefinition of the concept of community (as also happens in

Matar a Videla). It also invites to a redefinition of the economic system that has been imposed from the government politics and how these affect everyday life.

5.1 The Artificial Eye

The opening sequence of El secreto de tus ojos focuses directly into Irene’s eyes while she watches Benjamín leave and board a train. In fact, the whole sequence is filmed in a blurry Stop Motion CGI where everything seems to be distorted, as Esposito continues walking towards the train while cutting to Irene’s eyes two more times. The viewer will learn later that the introduction is part of a distant memory, the moment where Esposito was forced to leave in order to save his life. The introduction immediately establishes that the whole narrative will be built on different fragments of the character’s individual memory. Simultaneously, the sequence underscores the importance or the role of the eyes, or better yet, the importance of the stare or gaze. Even though the gaze has been discussed all over the humanities to its satiety, the importance of eyes situates the film within the film imaginary of Argentina’s past, since the act of watching or being watched is of great importance in most of the films recreating the past.

180

On the other hand, the focus on Isabel’s eyes – which is the co-star and not the principal character – symbolizes an external gaze. To stare, and not only to stare but to stare with an obsessive desire, will always be from an Other who will be vigilant from this point on. In other words, that gaze will always be of someone else and it will testify a desire that will not end. That is precisely the case of Isidoro and the reason why Esposito feels he is the one who raped and killed Liliana Coloto. His hunch is based on the way

Isidoro appeared to be staring at Liliana in her old high school pictures. In fact, when

Isabel asks him about why he was so convinced of Isidoro’s guiltiness, Esposito cannot answer and his response becomes a stutter. The connection will be stressed later in the film when both present-day characters are watching a picture taken in those days.

Esposito is shown looking away from the camera and directly onto Isabel, a stare that links the character with the villain.

The introduction sequence and the shots focusing on Isabel’s eyes also underline the gaze’s external nature. If we are to talk about the past, we need to take a step back and separate ourselves from the immediacy of the present. El secreto de sus ojos, then, situates itself as one of the most recent efforts to look at Argentina’s history in an attempt to rebuild/revise the collective memory. In fact, according to Linda Hutcheon, one of the characteristics of postmodernism is the revision of history.58 In the specific case of

Argentina, Gabriela Nouzeilles explains that there has been an emerging of multiple

“fractured discourses of memory” (Postmemory Cinema 263). According to her, and in relation with the last dictatorship, there has been a great number of “accounts dealing

58 See, “The Politics of Postmodernism: Parody and History”, Cultural Critique 5, 1986-1987.

181

with personal and traumatic experiences, available to the public through countless autobiographies, diaries and all sorts of testimonial accounts. Literature, art, film, as well as photography have all provided their own renderings of the traumatic and the confessional” (263). In other words, there has been a connection through aesthetics to retell history, bringing back what was silenced before. Literature and film in this case, are used as representational devices whose intent is to expand the personal accounts of the different subjectivities that form the polis/nation.

However, the reconstruction of memory through film depends on its artificiality.

In other words, while it relates to the collective memory, it is meant to be a representation which, as has been explained before, has its own logistics. At the same time, any artistic manifestation renounces any claim of truth in its representation because it focuses on the subjectivities created for the narrative, as if there is a lost transaction in the act of remembering, something that you cannot recover because it always depends on the person recounting the facts.

An awareness of this artificiality is needed to recreate the past in El secreto de sus ojos. Going back to that introduction sequence, the CGI on the moment Esposito is leaving underlines that the past will be an artificial recreation based on the different fictional subjectivities. As a result, the lens will take the place of Isabel’s eyes in order to retell history. However, Campanella stresses the importance of art within the narrative, too, cutting to a shot of Esposito’s writing which describes what the viewer just saw in the introduction:

CUADERNO: Él también corrió veloz hacia el final del tren, y vió cómo ella, toda su figura que hasta ayer era gigantesca, se achicaba en el andén hasta quedar pequeña a sus ojos pero cada vez más grande en su corazón.

182

[NOTEBOOK: He ran to the end of the train and watched as her figure, once gigantic, now shrank in his eyes, but grew more than ever in his heart.]

Because there is a direct screen shot of the paper, Campanella establishes, then, a link between memory, visual image, and literature. In fact, the plot that moves the whole narrative is Benjamin’s motivation to write a novel about the “Morales Case” and that moment of their past, which takes place in the broader moment of Argentina’s history in

1973.

ESPOSITO: Quiero escribir sobre la causa de Morales […] No sé por qué. […] Me estoy acordando. En realidad nunca más hablamos de eso. ¿Por qué nunca más hablamos de eso?

[ESPOSITO: I want to write about the Morales case […] I don’t know why. […] it’s been on my mind. We actually never talked about it. Why is that?]

Esposito becomes, not only witness of that case, but also a symbolization of the artist – as writer – figure. In fact, even the promotional poster (in the United States) makes this reference, as the dark silhouette of Darín is shown writing in the old type-writer,59 while a young Soledad Villamil is in the frame of an open door.

As a writer-artist Esposito’s figure is responsible for a search of answers that will be both the narrative’s “deux ex machina” as well as the personal question he wants to answer in his book in terms of those who are filled with emptiness as a result of some loss. In terms of Esposito, he uses Morales, who becomes the symbol of those who lost

59 The Olivetti typewriter is also used as a symbol of the two main topics under the narrative: fear and love. As a result, the machine cannot write the letter “a”, writing “temo” (I fear) instead of “te amo” (I love you).

183

and wait, as the compass to answer that question. As such, those are the questions that motivate him to discover the truth about Morales:

ESPOSITO (V.O.): ¿Cómo se hace para llenar una vida vacía? ¿Cómo se hace para llenar una vida llena…de nada? ¿Cómo se hace?

[ESPOSITO (V.O.): How can someone live an empty life? How do you live a life full of nothing? How do you do it?]

A life “full of nothing” is where Esposito, as well as Ricardo Morales and Isidoro

Gómez are trapped. In the climatic scene at the end, where Esposito finds out about

Isidoro’s fate at the hands of Ricardo, the camera focuses on different angles to show all three characters behind bars. It is at that moment that Esposito discovers, not only the answer to his question, but that he was also trapped in a life full of nothing, that the three characters did not get past the trauma of the past.

The “Morales Case” represents therefore the trauma of the past for the three characters. It also represents the trauma of the violent days preceding the last dictatorship and the trauma of the violent government. In other words, it is a symbol of both the singular narratives within the fiction as well as the symbol for the collective trauma caused by the oppressive politics of Isabel Perón and the military. In fact, when Romano

(Mariano Argento), who was behind the release of Gómez, is confronted by Esposito and

Isabel about why Isidoro was on the streets again, he answers that the latter was politically valuable:

ROMANO: Gómez, Gómez, Gómez…Sí, empezó con nosotros cuando estaba en la cárcel. Lo que hacía era llevar información, traer, espiar jóvenes guerrilleros. Pero anduvo muy bien, ¿eh? Se hizo querer. ¿Por qué? No, ¿no están de acuerdo?

184

IRENE: ¿Usted se da cuenta de lo que está diciendo? Es un asesino convicto y confeso. ROMANO: Sera, será, sí. Pero también es una persona inteligente y de coraje. Capaz de entrar en una casa y hacer lo que hay que hacer. Además, la vida personal de él, honestamente, ¿no? Con todos los subversivos que hay dando vuelta nos tiene sin cuidado. Si vamos a ir con los buenos solamente…. IRENE: Es un detenido procesado a la orden del juzgado del doctor Fortuna y nosotros… ESPOSITO: ¿Vos crees que yo no sé que vos lo liberaste para joderme? ¿Pensás que soy un pelotudo? ROMANO: Son dos preguntas, ¿cuál de las dos quieres que te responda primero? IRENE: ¿Es cierto eso? ROMANO: Dra., a ver, ¿Le puedo pedir un favor? No se meta. ¿Qué quiere hacer? ¿Presentar un recurso de amparo? Honestamente no se ofenda pero no puede hacer nada. Lo que sí puede hacer es volverse a su oficina, quedarse sentadita, mirar y aprender. Porque la Argentina que se viene no se enseña en Harvard.

[ROMANO: Gómez, Gómez, Gómez…Yes. He started working for us when he was in jail. He’d give us information, spy on young guerillas…He did good work. We liked him. Why? You don’t agree? IRENE: Do you realize what you are saying? He confessed. He’s a convicted murderer. ROMANO: Perhaps, but he is also intelligent and brave. He can break into a home and get the job done. Plus, his personal life is his own business, right? With all the subversives out there…who cares? If we only used good guys… IRENE: He was arrested under Judge Fornuna’s jurisdiction and we… ESPOSITO: Do you think I don’t know you let him go to get back at me? You think I’m an idiot? ROMANO: That’s two questions. Which one shall I answer first? IRENE: Is that true?

185

ROMANO: Doctor, let’s see, would you do me a favor? Stay out of it. What are you going to do, file an appeal? Honestly, no offense, but there’s nothing you can do. Except go back to your office, take a seat, watch and learn. They don’t teach the Argentina that is coming at Harvard.]

Romano’s prophetic voice underlines that the case was beyond the specificity of Isidoro.

The “Argentine to come” is what leads to the murder of Pablo in an attempt to get rid of

Esposito. In that sense, the micro-narrative is inserted in a specific moment in the past to symbolize a collective past of the nation (macro-narrative).

The connection with the broader moment in history symbolizes an ethical debate

pertinent to the polis, especially because of the silence imposed in the past. In terms of

the victims of Argentina’s violent history, how can the victims of the dictatorship achieve

any sense of justice? If the law was corrupt and oppressive, how can it be applied? In

fact, taking into consideration that Isabel was representing the law and her power was

obsolete to apply a life sentence for Isidoro, then there is a discontinuity of Law, or a de

facto “state of exception”, to use Agamben’s term.

There is another ethical consideration that is represented with the Morales story’s

resolution: if the institutions in charge of law and order (to protect the people within its

polis) fail to protect its citizens, are they empowered to make their own justice? That is

the case of Morales, who, after learning that Isodoro got a free pass out of jail, decided to

kidnap and put him in his own personal jail. As a result, when Isidoro discovers the

secret, Morales’ response is “you said he got a life sentence” (“Usted dijo perpetua”).

Isidoro’s punishment is not only being incarcerated for life by Ricardo, but losing all of

his humanity as well. As a result, the only thing he begs Escudito is to ask Ricardo for

any conversation:

186

ISIDORO: Al menos dígale que aunque sea me hable.

[ISIDORO: Tell him at least to talk to me.]

In that moment, Isidoro, who went to pick up his food dragging his feet like a beast, underscores his lost humanity as he reveals the lack of language or communication with any other human being. Once Benjamín does not answer to his plead, he understands that even the new witness will deny him his request, so Isidoro returns to hide in his cell.

The ethical considerations that the scene embodies seal the gap between past and present. The state of exception in the past still shapes the collective imaginary of the polis in the present, as well as the trauma of the violent history. However, El secreto de sus ojos is reluctant to take any straight political position beyond the reconsideration of the different roles that were and are at play. The shock of the scene and of Isidoro’s punishment, as well as the order of takes from beyond the cell to film all three actors, implies that individual law – a law responding to the individual notions of moral and justice – brings the person to the same level where his prisoner is. Both of them will face the same penalty, which is why the viewer can see Ricardo grabbing his head in the background as Esposito decides to leave the prison (where he is also incarcerated).

5.2 Underneath the Surface: Uncovering Argentina through Garage Olimpo

"We’re doing a big publicity campaign so that people will know that the film is there, so that people who were not directly involved will learn what happened.” -Marco Bechis

Marco Bechi’s Garage Olimpo revises the implications of a violent political policy that both marked a collective trauma and left many casualties as a result (both

187

physically and psychologically). The film examines a wound that is part of a traumatized body which becomes a macro-symbol: the afflicted collective body in representation for that plurality of voices that were affected by the policies of the last junta, and their insistence of creating a homogeneous polis by the use of force.

In fact, the external threat and state of exception is also what ignites the violence shown in Garage Olimpo. As discussed in Chapter 3, the state of exception is rescued and explained by Agamben as a moment where the political regime declares an atypical empty space of force of law without law. This suspension of the law is always justified by an external threat (state of necessity) which habilitates a state of war. In the case of

Argentina, the dictatorship declared war against what they called “the reactionaries”, a term used for the armed revolutionary movements of the Left. However, the “motive” for war allowed the government to establish a random persecution of intellectuals and people who dared to challenge the system, as is the case of Esposito in El secreto de sus ojos. In

Garage Olimpo, the antagonism of the radical Right and the radical Left is stressed by

Felix, while interrogating a supposed member of these groups:

FELIX: ¿Tenés miedo? PRISIONERO: Sí. FELIX: Es feo el miedo, ¿no? ¿Pasaste hambre alguna vez? PRISIONERO: Alguna vez. FELIX: ¿Sabes que yo pasé mucha hambre? PRISIONERO: ¿Ah sí? FELIX: No quiero volver a pasar hambre por gente como vos. PRISIONERO: ¡Mientras estemos nosotros a vos no te va a faltar que comer hijo de puta!

188

[FELIX: Are you afraid? PRISIONER: Yes. FELIX: It’s horrible to be afraid, no? Have you ever suffered from hunger? PRISIONER: Once or twice. FELIX: Do you know that I’ve suffered from hunger a lot? PRISIONER: Oh yeah? FELIX: I don’t ever want to be hungry again because of people like you. PRISIONER: You’ll never be hungry while we last here you son of a bitch!]

Violence is then justified with the idea of food, which is an icon of stability and prosperity, contrasting with the idea of hunger or enduring hunger, hence, a lack of means.

The scene of torture depicts a graphic manifestation of violence, from the threat of being watched to the graphic torture. This is the portrayal of “a nation at war”’ (following the narrative proclaimed by the regime), where all dissidence was to be more than silenced: erased. Garage Olimpo focuses on the ‘disappeared’ (“desaparecidos”) themselves,60 the graphic victims of the political regime and a common trait with other countries of the Southern Cone.

The duplicity between how Argentina was defined by the polis and what it was underneath the façade of the national discourse is also approached by Bechis. Garage

Olimpo focuses on the visual image of a Buenos Aires from the very beginning. After the opening sequence of a Close-Up of the River Plate, there is a Cut To sequence filmed in

60 In fact, the complete title of the film is Garage Olimpo: Desaparecidos.

189

an Extreme-Shot that provides a general view of the city while it plays non-diegetic

Argentinean pop-music from the seventies.61 This opening places the viewer in a specific location (the Federal Capital) and moment in time. In that sense, the film uses media as an instrument to revise the past and what was not being told in that moment. Following

Adorno, spectacle and entertainment (radio, pop-music) were instruments used by the political-economical system (what he called the Culture Industry) to distract people from the government’s oppressiveness and to undermine any resistance or critique.62 In that sense, popular music is used in Garage Olimpo as a representation of distraction, an instrument to avoid the act of “looking” at the horrors below the political discourses of a new, safe and prosperous nation.

It is no coincidence that the immediate following shot cuts to a familiar moment in Argentine history: the terrorist attack of Ana María Gonzales – a member of the extreme Left group ‘montoneros’ – who faked a friendship with General Cardozo’s daughter in order to kill him by placing a bomb under his bed.63 As such, the movie

61 There are two versions of this opening scene, the one described above and another without the soundtrack. In that other version a Voice-Over of a radio announcer substitutes the music.

62 See Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120-68. Adorno and Horkheimer focuses on American culture, which is what they had in mind with the term Cultural Industry at its best. However, entertainment and spectacle are their main targets, as they allow people to be distracted from their situation in a capitalist society, which they considered as oppressive as any other form of government and economical model.

63 General Cesáreo Cardozo was Chief of the Federal Police after the coup and he was considered to be the third most important man in charge of supervising and torturing militants from the left armed groups ERP and the ‘montoneros’. He was killed early into the dictatorship by Gonzales in June 18, 1976. Ana María paid with her life for her attack on January 4, 1977 while trying to escape. The name of Cardozo is never used in the film while the young girl is called ‘Ana’, a clear reference to the terrorist attack. To read the news, see Miguel Yuste, ‘Muere en atentado el jefe de la policía argentina’, El País, June, 19, 1976. http://www.elpais.com/articulo/internacional/ARGENTINA/Muere/atentado/jefe/policia/federal/argentina/e lpepiint/19760619elpepiint_1/Tes?print=1. According to Amy Kaminsky, Bechis actually uses fiction without basing it on history. As such, “El Olimpo”, the case of Gonzales, and other moments in the film are meant to be a mere reference of history, without actually being that moment. While it is true that Cardozo is

190

portrays a ‘state of war’ right from the beginning, starting with a reference of the extreme left groups that were used by the military to accomplish the coup and to justify the state of exception. The choosing of this historical event and its use in the middle of the narrative underscores the idea of going beyond the regime’s definition of the nation. The idea that the bomb was underneath the bed immediately underlines the importance of looking beneath the surface. What lies beneath in Garage Olimpo is always bursting or about to explode. Bechis insists on representing the idea of two nations: the one depicted by the political regime and the one underneath its political discourse, where tortures and murders were the norm of the day. This duality is also established with the series of aerial shots inserted between the narrative’s plot. Those shots present a city moving as if everything were normal. At the same time, these aerial shots highlight the double layer between what is seen at a first glance and what lies underneath. In fact, inspired by testimonies of survivors, Garage Olimpo even shows radio music coming from the sewers, while the city and its people continued with their lives on top of that.64

The film returns to the idea of what lies beneath at the end, when we see the airplane model Hercules C-130 in the air, ready to dispose of all the people kidnapped and soon to be disappeared, their bodies drugged to a state of unconsciousness and about

not referenced, and that the one who dies like Cardozo is El Tigre (in charge of Garage Olimpo), I believe the director would use totally fictitious incidents in the plot if it was not his intention to address specific points in Argentine history. See Kaminsky, Amy. “Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo: Cinema of Witness.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. No. 48, Winter, 2006.

64 More and more testimonies affirm the use of music as a way to cover up the tortures. As recently as September 6, 2010, Horacio Vivas, a survivor from another Clandestine Center of Detention called ‘El Vesuvio’ recounted how the torturers used Spaniard singer Julio Iglesias to cover the screams. Once he got out and went to Spain, he could not hear the singer again. See Alejandra Dandan, ‘Distinguía día y noche por los ladridos’, El País, 7 September 2010, p. 14.

191

to be dropped into the waters of River Plate. While “La Aurora” is set as non-diegetic music,65 the plane, with the Argentinean flag on its wing,66 opens its back doors as the audience sees the shadow of María before being thrown to her death.67 The final shot, which presents an aerial High-Shot of the water as seen from a plane, links the end of the film with the Opening Shot, underlining the importance of that first sequence. The river is a watery grave and the final witness to the horrors committed during the military junta.

The water therefore works as an oppositional icon that, instead of life, represents death.

Its image also contradicts the happy music on the radio. As a result, image and sound oppose each other to symbolize an oppositional body that defies the homogeneous construction of the nation.

The dismantling of the national discourse allows an interaction between the imagined community and the space of aesthetics. In other words, not only is art always political because it deals with the modern polis, but the imaginary of the nation is also created and conceived (like art), and even when it represents and responds to the political or public realities of a community, it works on a symbolic level. The nation itself is a creation, used to artificially ‘unite’ the people under a homogeneous discourse. As I have mentioned, that symbolic reality is imposed by force and in a unilateral direction,

65 “La aurora” was a hymn sang in schools in honor of the flag. Many people know it as the “Salute to the Flag” (“Saludo a la bandera”).

66 Bechis cuts to a Close-Up of the wing in order to show the Argentinean flag.

67 This is implied when Bechis cuts to a shot of the river, right after the shot to María’s shadow. As Guillermo Ravaschino states, by the time Garage Olimpo was released, it was common knowledge in Argentina that the military used those planes to throw drugged bodies to the river so that no one would find them again. See Guillermo Ravaschino, ‘Garage Olimpo’, Cineismo.com [accessed 26 October 2010]

192

justified politically by the threat of ‘war’. Consequently, the national construction meant a constant aggression from the state to its citizens. The symbol, therefore, becomes real through politics, defining that term as the actions of the political authority, which in

Argentina meant affecting and ending the lives of thousands of people. The reality of that symbol is confirmed within film the representation of what is considered dear to the national identity of Argentina: the flag, the ‘salute to the flag’ (which invokes at the same time the flag and national pride), and even popular music. That definition of the

Argentinean community and their reassurance with national representations can be seen even today. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, art uses these elements and promotes a discussion by its exposition within the polis (in the film theatres). However, artistic expressions refuse to settle on any imposition from political authority. In fact, they are always a response from a subjectivity that takes a direct role within the polis, claiming a place in that collective imaginary.

The space that art demands for itself within the contemporary polis insists then on including different possibilities for the reactions it wants to provoke, opening venues for other considerations that borrow from the inventive of fictional representation. This is precisely how Garage Olimpo reproduces the discussion of the disappeared, from fictional narratives that attempt to represent those voices or, in this case, bodies, that were ousted from that collective body. However, those bodies are even more important to

Bechis, who uses his art to create an international awareness of Argentina’s past.68

68 The film is a co-production with Italy and it was critically acclaimed as an art-film on the international market.

193

The disappeared are mainly symbolized in the film with the character of María.

However, the whole experience of portraying the disappeared in Garage Olimpo moves back and forth within the identity of the victim (María), the torturer (Félix), and the symbolized non-identity of the ‘disappeared’. In other words, to be disappeared means to be a non-entity between the torturer and different levels of torture and victimization.

To represent the violence of being ‘disappeared’ as an act of torture, Bechis recreates the experience on two levels: the representation of the tortured body and the mimetic experience of the torture for the audience. The former is portrayed with the representations of the bodies being tortured. Starting with the promotional poster, the movie evokes the figure of a tortured victim, from the picture of a person with their eyes covered (which was one of the most frequently used promotional posters), to that of a hostage down on its knees, held at gun-point, and looking up towards the top-angle camera with an expression of desperate resignation on his (her) face.

In fact, the image of the tortured victim is central to this film.69 Garage Olimpo not only presents the naked body of María to be sacrificed, but also of another presumed militant suffering through the process. These bodies are presented on the table of torture naked, bodies that are tools for information. At that table and in the center of torture overall, the detainee is just something to dispose of, a number from which to extract information. The transgressive act starts by dehumanizing the prisoner, robbing all sense of identity to make them empty bodies, ‘casualties of war’.

69 As such, the first promotional device for the film was the picture of María with her eyes folded all over Buenos Aires.

194

The non-body also follows the modern logics described by Foucault, in other words, the body as a subject to be observed. In the case of an oppressive government in a state of exception, these logics become perverse. In the hole of the state of exception, the detainee ceases being a citizen; it does not belong to the national polis anymore, and therefore, is erased from all public life. In Garage Olimpo the body is discarded by the

State (a non-citizen) and reclaimed by the State as a tool to extract information. This information, however, becomes symbolic, given that it was more the simulation of extracting information than a real effort to extract it. In fact, according to the testimony of

Horacio Vivas, the torturers asked questions that did not make any sense, as if they were not sure what they were looking for (Dandan 14). On the representational level of María, the character does not seem to have any real affiliation with the extreme left groups and is just shown as someone “suspicious” for teaching poor uneducated people in the projects.

In any case, the only thing she is asked for in the movie is to give ‘some information’, which leads her to reveal a point of encounter with her partners of an unknown resistance group. Besides that, they do not ask for anything in particular during the film, even when the torture went on and on and she was not set free. This reflects that the body of the victim was just a symbolic source of information. At the end, they were not looking for any information at all but kept looking for more bodies to torture.

On the other hand, and as I mentioned earlier, Garage Olimpo uses the image to echo the experience of torture, though merely at the aesthetic level. The film is as much about showing the tortured body as well as a torture (or simulacra) to the spectator. In terms of film language, it has been the case of other directors that violence has a greater

195

effect if you use other tools of cinema beyond the actual image.70 In the case of Garage

Olimpo, the sound and yells (of the fictionalized victims) seem to place the audience, not only as a witness, but in the position of the victim as well. In other words, because art can only interact with the polis through its role as art, its intention to be a film about torture itself can only work in terms of that and with the use of other resources of the film. The best art can do is to provoke the simulacra of a torture from a level of perception in order to create an ethical awareness. As a result, we watch María, not only being tormented from the moment she is kidnapped, but also going through one form of torture to another, from a physical to a psychological level, in a situation that does not seem to have an end.

María is trapped in a hopeless position where she is being robbed of every human right.

The emblematic moment for the character comes when she makes a desperate attempt to escape. In a moment of distraction by Texas (Pablo Razuk) while going outside, he leaves the door of the garage open. María makes her move then. However, it just takes fourteen seconds of the camera shooting at the open garage door from the inside (without cutting to a new take) to see Texas dragging María back:

TEX: ¡Miren quién volvió! ¡La pajarita que quería volar!

[TEX: Look who’s here! The little bird that wanted to fly!]

He ends up laying María on her knees and putting a gun to the back of her head. It is in that iconic image of the film that the constant suffering and the impossibility to return

70 Fight Club (1999) is an example of this. According to his director David Fincher, the violent scene where one of the characters face is destroyed, was filmed both with actual shooting of the beating and with a series of Cut To other faces while adding the sound effect of the punches. The second one caused a greater impression than the actual shooting of the beating. The interview can be seen in the special features of the Collector’s Edition DVD.

196

outside – that is, to rejoin the polis – is underlined. Even when Texas does not shoot her at the end of that sequence, one thing is clear, she would not escape and the torture, for the character and the audience, will continue. The body of the victim is reduced at that moment to the humiliation of being robbed of all sense of agency within the narrative, dehumanized. At the same time the spectator is forced to look, feeling powerless to change what happened with those real voices that were silenced, to change the outcome of that imposition from the regime to its people. In other words, the audience is also robbed of its symbolic agency to change those events.

The symbol, and the uneasiness of being forced to watch what any modern

Argentinean now knows, is therefore a substitute for the absence of agency on a specific point in history, but aims to underline a collective knowledge in the modern polis. The intention is not to reveal any truth, to bring the torturers into justice, or to have this issue settled once and for all. Instead, art works as a symbol for a past that helps to preserve an uneasy memory into the present day. In fact, for Jasques Rancière, “images of the camps testify not only to the tortured bodies they show us, but also to what they do not show: the disappeared bodies, obviously, but above all the very process of annihilation.” (

Future, 26). In that case, aesthetics, as well as the collective memory of that annihilation, has to be created to insist on the same political awareness that makes them possible in the first place. Only then can aesthetic re-creations challenge the strong artificiality of the nation, as described by the political regime in power.

5.3 Symbolic Representation of a Trauma

La experiencia histórica traumática es inclusiva, entran también

197

–por supuesto- los que la vieron pasar de lejos y, si acaso hubo alguno, los que no se enteraron de nada. -Ángel Núñez

Collective trauma and the tension between the artificial definitions of the nation as are also at stake in La mirada invisible. In fact, as I have described earlier, the film adaptation shares much of the thematic concerns of the literary version in Ciencias morales. The importance of the film lies on the “visualization” of the gaze itself. In fact, the promotional poster of the film is the image of Marita looking through the bathroom window, an obvious reference of the vicious cycle where she ends up. The title stresses out the importance of its invisibility for its omnipotent nature:

BIASUTTO: Estas cosas pasan, no es muy común que un profesor falte pero bueno, hay razones de fuerza mayor. Lo importante es que mantenga el orden dentro del alumnado. MARITA: Sí señor Biasutto. BIASUTTO: Dígame María Teresa. ¿Cuál es el secreto de la buena disciplina? MARITA: ¿La vigilancia? BIASUTTO: Sí, muy bien. ¿Pero qué clase de vigilancia? Una vigilancia permanente. ¿Y cómo logramos esa vigilancia permanente? MARITA: Vigilando todo el tiempo, en todo lugar. BIASUTTO: ¡Ah! Exacto. Para eso necesitamos una mirada atenta hasta en el menor detalle. […] ¿Sí? MARITA: La mirada invisible. BIASUTTO: Eso es, la mirada invisible.

198

[BIASUTTO: These things happen. It’s not common for a teacher to be absent but, well, there are significant reasons. The important thing is to keep control in the classroom. MARITA: Of course, Mr. Biasutto. BIASUTTO: Tell me María Teresa, Do you know the secret of keeping good discipline? MARITA: Surveillance? BIASUTTO: Yes, very good. But what sort of surveillance? A permanent surveillance, and how do we achieve it? MARITA: By watching all the time, everywhere. BIASUTTO: Exactly! That’s why we need an incisive look to every little detail. […] Right? MARITA: The invisible eye. BIASUTTO: That’s it, the invisible eye.]

The consequences of a continuous gaze in order to control echo once again the modern logics of knowledge and power explained by Foucault. However, the oppressive politics of a closed political system like a dictatorship twists this logic into a paranoid look. The condition of paranoia conduces to an extreme suspicion and mistrust of other people as a result of a hallucination state. What the paranoid understands as the constant threat alienates him from social functioning. La mirada invisible presents then a Marita which becomes totally alienated while convinced of spying the male bathroom. Once again we have a film which insists on an alienated look to recreate the past. As in El secreto de sus ojos, La mirada invisible insists on looking from an “outside”. This ousted look will uncover the crime, as happens in Campanela’s film. However, the crime is never revealed by Marita’s gaze in La mirada invisible. What she discovers instead is an attraction to one of her students (Varini), which she suspects is the perpetrator from the beginning. In

199

that sense, her desire of discovering the student connects her with him, as she becomes an outsider of the law in school for entering into the male restroom.

The climatic moment of the film does reveal a crime. However, it is not the uncovering of a smoking student, but the uncovering of the perverse logic of surveillance and its constant gaze. As I mentioned earlier, Lehrman chooses a climatic rape instead of a number of rapes (as in the novel). This decision creates a dramatic effect of invasion.

Marita’s rape becomes the moment when the invasion of privacy – which was started by her desperate intention to follow Biassuto’s rule of being vigilant – achieves its ultimate consequence: the physical invasion on the subject. While the novel insists on making the rape an abuse of power and a violent imposition to the weak (Marita) – echoing the every day of the public space during the days of the last junta – the movie presents it as the manifestation of the most brutal result of the gaze’s intrusion to the life of others. In other words, the rape of Marita becomes the extreme result of the gaze. As such, the rape becomes the symbolic manifestation of the dialectics of modernity where the gaze is a mean of acquiring knowledge and controlling of the individual. To look is to impose a violent intromission of the State to the subject, a form to achieve submission through the relation of power it releases.

The rape scene levels the gaze’s intrusion to the life of others with the violent imposition of power through rape. On the one hand, the State, represented here as Mr.

Biasutto, becomes an oppressive figure, capable of nulling the will of the other, in this case, those who do not abide by the rules of power. The interesting part of the film is that, even when Marita does abide to the rules enforced inside the school, she becomes an outsider when she becomes obsessed with the student. In a scene right before the rape,

200

Lehrman shoots a sequence in where Biasutto discovers Marita looking at the student,

while he was looking at her. The mise-en-scène reveals the triangle that was build along

the plot through the gaze of each character. The triangle reveals the monstrous cycle

resulting from the paranoid polis. In an echo of the novel, Biasutto will say to Marita:

BIASUTTO: Usted sabe Cornejo que la subversión es como un cáncer. Primero toma un órgano que puede ser la juventud, la infecta de violencia, de ideas extrañas…pero después ese cáncer hace sus ramificaciones que se llaman metástasis. A esas también hay que combatirlas. Fumar en el colegio, ¿qué es? Es el cáncer de la subversión que todavía nos amenaza.

[BIASUTTO: Cornejo, you know subversion is like cancer. It spreads first into an organ that may very well be the youth. It infects them with violence, with strange ideas…but after that cancer complicates to metastasis. One has to fight those ones, too. Smoking in the school, what is that? I’ll tell you, it is the cancer of subversion that continues to threaten us today.]

The obsession of looking at the other is the result of this paranoid discourse. Justified by that threat the law becomes a threatening imposition on its citizens, which in the movie is symbolized with the rape.

This enforcement of the Law translates into oppression, and with it, a brutal violence which transforms the body of the individual into naked life (“zoē”). As it is shown in Garage Olimpo, the suspect in La mirada invisible is deprived of its human rights. Everyone confined to the school walls are a mere body, an object on which to instill information (instead of extracting information like in the Clandestine Centers) and upon which to execute power.

Both films situate the body as being inflicted by the representations of the

government. In Garage Olimpo the naked body is that of the possible radical. In La

mirada invisible this excess of power is executed within the representation of the polis

itself; the school. There is no visible threat within the school, but as in the rest of the

201

polis, there is always a potential threat. Every student that disobeys the rules is a potential subversive, therefore a potential threat who has to be disciplined by the symbolic law of the school. However, at the moment Biassuto identifies himself in Marita’s obsession with another body (that of the student), he feels free to take her human rights away. In other words, either you follow the Law (thus dating him and marrying him) or you become a disciplinary target.

The representation in La mirada invisible becomes a symbol of the last days of the dictatorship.71 The movie also hints at a metafictional representation in terms of narrative because the school is a symbolic representation of the polis just as the film is a symbolic representation of history. As such, the logics within the school are always suspecting an irruption of the law, which is translated into the potential end of the system.

The oppressive law becomes then an instrument, not of knowledge, but of control.

The whole system portrayed in La mirada invisible represents the most violent results of the politics followed in Argentina during the dictatorship. It created a paranoid society incarcerated within their own laws which finally ripped the nation apart, thus the rape scene as well as its retribution. It is important that Marita takes time to fix her hair after stabbing Biassuto. It is a reassurance of herself – the oppressed – that immediately undertakes a political identification from the director’s part.

Lehrer also stresses the importance of the narrative as a symbolic representation of confinement within the nation. The final scene of the narrative, right after Marita leaves Bassuto bleeding to his death in the bathroom (while outside the dictatorship was

71 The story actually takes place at the beginning of 1982 in the film, six years after the coup.

202

falling apart), finishes a sequence of takes of Marita crossing the long hall in the middle of the school. The difference of the mise-en-scène of each sequence is the proximity of the lens. As a result, the last shot of the sequence does not present the walls of the school like in the previous shots; it just shows the actress walking in the middle of an endless set of monotonous black and white floor tiles. Biasutto is over, just like the dictatorship; the walk is wide open; but the colors that marked the traumatic experience remain to characterize the “road”.

5.4 Trauma for Sale

Y pasaron 30 años. Todavía tengo las marcas en todo el cuerpo …y en la memoria. -Matar a Videla

The collective traumatic experience is also a main theme in Matar a Videla. In fact, the whole story of Julian is about an alienated person in a neoliberal society. His sole reason for existence is to plan the assassination of the (main) face that symbolizes the dictatorship: Jorge Videla. The former president and leader of the military junta remains the face of trauma. In fact, one only needs to see a march or any political rally in

Argentina to see Videla’s face in more than one poster as a symbol of repression, violence and terror. Director Nicolás Capelli presents his visual image as shattered as he can, with a lot of cuttings and out of focus shots. Through his movie, Capelli suggests that to represent Argentina’s political reality through film, that image has to be the picture of a broken nation, or at least, one where political tensions are clashing constantly. At the same time, and even when Argentina’s political arena was one of constant tensions during the twentieth century, Videla – the commander in charge when the militaries took over – represents the end point of having any hopes of transforming

203

the political order. The coup dismantled the political turmoil of the seventies beneath

Videla’s face. Hence, past and present are represented in the film through a cannibalistic atmosphere that nullifies any attempt of political restructuration and leads to individual isolation:

JULIÁN: A lo largo de la historia nos quisieron con mentiras y promesas de paraíso. […] Primero […] a una izquierda que no parece haber ganado. Después […] a la derecha que cree haber ganado hasta dejarnos jugar en el centro, a quien dejan creer que va a ganar. ¿Y quienes pierden? Todos. Nosotros, ellos, todos. Eso, eso que le mostraron a la gente como sistema los tiene muy ocupados para meterse en algo, y las personas que no se meten no van a entender jamás a los que sí, yo lo sé muy bien, soy uno de ellos […] bueno, lo era.

[JULIÁN: History is filled with a lot of lies and promises of Paradise. […] First […] there is a left that didn’t win. Then […] the Right that thinks it won and lets us play outside, lets us think we are going to win. And who loses? Everybody. Us, them, everybody. That thing they said was the system distracts us to the point of not being able to do something, and people who don’t know how everything works will never understand those who try to do something. I know that very well, I am one of them […] Well, I was one of them.]

Videla, as a disruptor of the political and economical order, becomes the symbol of a system that creates the illusion of liberty as long as there is not a real interaction of the people within the political order. In other words, it is a system that leads to isolation, an isolated society represented in Julian.

However, the Argentine polis nowadays is divided into political groups (of all sides of the political strata), different time periods (past and present), and the isolated society that resulted of all these elements interacting together. Isolation is also the result of the economical system inherited since Videla: a neoliberal order where “freedom” consists of external free markets and consumerism. Freedom becomes just an illusion of itself. This is underlined when Julián reflects on contemporary Argentina: 204

JULIÁN: ¿Y Dios? Dios se convertió en telemarketing.

[JULIÁN: God? God turned into telemarketing.]

As such, the new religion in a post-Videla Argentina is none other than a consumerist ideology built outside national frontiers, where people are bombarded every day with information to buy different products.

However, there are different results between the inheritance of the last junta and the inheritance left by Pinochet in the neighboring country of Chile. The military project created by Videla failed to establish a successful neoliberal agenda, in part, because of the short time of their dictatorship and because of the Falkland War.72 In fact, this failure is the reason why most Argentineans reject the policies of the last junta, while there is a greater number of Chileans who defend Pinochet’s regime.73 However, Argentina did attempt to establish a neo-liberal model which achieved its peak during the nineties with the government of Carlos Menem, whose policies – which defended an aggressive program of privatization – were favored until the economy collapsed in 2001. As a result,

Argentineans were politically apathetic until that year.

However, the economic crisis was the result of the neo-liberal agenda inherited from Videla; the icon of the violence needed to create a free-market atmosphere. The

72 The long time in power allowed Pinochet to inject the economy artificially in different moments of economic crisis, an opportunity that the military junta in Argentina did not have. At the same time, Pinochet never nationalized copper, and this helped the economy to avoid total collapse during the crisis.

73 According to Eduardo Galeano this is only a perception given that the real motor for the economy in Chile was the industry of copper, nationalized by Salvador Allende as part of his socialist agenda. However, the plans were set in motion during the presidency of Frei, Allende’s predecessor. Eduargo Galeano also affirms that the neoliberal practices of Pinochet drove Chile near an economic collapse and copper saved the country of a complete crisis. See Ser como ellos (To be Like Them).

205

military complex supposes the type of violence needed within politics to open a safe atmosphere for the economic policies that sustain capitalism and the big industries that it feeds. Carlos Menem is not possible without Jorge Videla.

The result is an alienated individual-society which becomes violent, too. Past and present are joined then in a return to violence. Hence Julián desires to become a murderer so he can escape his anonymous status and be redeemed by the community.

However, the reflection of violence poses the same ethical questions presented in

El secreto de sus ojos about justice, specifically about killing the old killers. To kill

Videla is to become Videla. Moreover we cannot omit that Julian’s desire to kill Videla is not about a common good, but a selfish desire of being recognized and escape the mediocrity that surrounds him. In other words, his desire is a result of his alienation, completing the symbolic relation presented in the film of past (dictatorship) and present

(neoliberalism). In terms of characters, Julian is the result of Videla, his orphan son, therefore his oedipal desire of killing Videla is a mimetic action of the father, perpetuating the mark, repeating the trauma.

Matar a Videla proposes then an alternative voice. To kill Videla cannot be a literal image, but a symbolic image of challenging the logics that shape the polis, both past and present. Killing the dictator means killing a system made possible by the post- dictatorship. In fact, Julian accepts that he needs to kill Videla even when he was not directly attached to the dictatorship:

JULIÁN: Yo no viví la dictadura y lo que sé de él, lo escuche o lo leí, como muchos de ustedes, de todas formas, siento asco por ese hombre, por lo que queda de él.

206

[JULIÁN: I never lived through the dictatorship. What I know about him, I heard it or read about it, like many of you. However, he makes me sick; I despise what is left of him.]

In that sense, even when there is a generational gap, Argentina remains to suffer the consequences of a past that insists on being confronted.

However, how to deal with that past? Capelli suggests that it is not possible to kill that past, to kill Videla. In that sense, Julian is robbed of his chance to kill the dictator, as he dies the same day Julian was going to kill him. In that sense, violence is not possible.

However, in order to rebuild the contemporary polis, past and present have to be joined together. Matar a Videla is precisely an attempt to deal with the past and the consequences of that past. It is not possible to rebuild the aspirations of the national community if the people living in it are unable to reflect on their situation. Matar a

Videla is therefore another example of aesthetics suggesting a political action while using fiction and addressing the problems unsolved within national frontiers.

5.5 Yesterday and Today: The Continuance of an Economic Model

However, Matar a Videla opens the door for an image that deals with the past from the present. Contrary to the other films, the film is not about the seventies or eighties, but about Argentina today, a country that still survives that past. While films like Garage Olimpo were prominent in finding new ways of reflecting on the past and how it affects us today, and La mirada invisible takes Martín Kohan’s book to reframe the question of the (last days of the) dictatorship within the confined walls of the School of Moral Sciences, La mirada invible insists on a reflection from the present time. In that sense the film aligns itself with El secreto de sus ojos, both reflecting on the past from the

207

present. Yet, Matar a Videla rewrites memory from a discontinued space; that of the second generation, the contemporary youth that had not experienced the dictatorship but that remains affected by it. While Esposito and the plot of Campanella’s film are about the survivors of those times living in the present, Julian is not. In that sense, Capelli positions himself in the newest trend of Argentinean filmmaking, which has been known as the “New Argentine Cinema” (“Nuevo cine argentino”). Nonetheless, as Ignacio

Amatriain explains, this movement is not a homogenous group formed with a common purpose, as it happened with the Dogme 95 cinematic movement of 1995, but rather a heterogeneous group re-defining the cinematic language of the country. The broad nature of the so-called group includes the previously discussed directors, from Marco Bechis to

Juan José Campanella.

However, Matar a Videla is an example of a new generation of directors within the movement that had not experienced the dictatorship firsthand, much as other young independent directors such as Albertina Carri (Los rubios). In that sense, Capelli distances himself from Campanella and his attempt to trace a line of past and present through film aesthetics. Matar a Videla is another consequence of the new scenery in the

Argentine film industry where directors are able to find their audience in alternative media to present their films.

Capelli, then, is able to open a door to connect the economic system of Argentina

(and the Southern Cone) with the violent past. Matar a Videla works as an aesthetic piece to uncover the myth that violence of politics within Argentina is a thing of the past.

Argentines are still living in a violent political atmosphere, even when the current government does not need to make their citizens disappear. Every disappeared person

208

embodied a political idea that people in power tried to erase from the polis all over the

Southern Cone. When those are no longer a threat, there is no need to physically eliminate individuals. As long as the intellectual is part of the “system”, the artist is just a commodity and any political critique of the system is discredited: there is no need for soldiers in the street.

The critique to the neoliberal system in Matar a Videla is not the only recent attempt within the New Argentine Cinema. In fact, the movie establishes a link with other films that do not necessarily take place during the last dictatorship, but that still dwell on the politics of contemporary Argentina, such as is the case with Lugares comunes. In fact, the situation that leads to Fernando’s unemployment and migration to the country-side is the economic crisis of Argentina at the beginning of the last decade. As such, the film becomes a fictional representation of some of the negative consequences of neoliberalism, which is not new for Aristarain. In fact, Lugares comunes establishes a connection with Un lugar en el mundo (A Place in the World, 1992), where the de- regulation of the market allows foreign enterprises to displace farmers and their lands by imposing their business in Argentina. There is a struggle between Luppi’s character, who resists the urge to sell, and the rest of the community that is selling their lands to Spanish enterprises. In that sense, community (nation) and transnationality collide, proving the tensions of the two in terms of politics. The farmers become, therefore, a national symbol, ready to sell in the eyes of the transnational enterprises. Mario (Federico Luppi) represents the invitation of a resistance that insists on keeping its land, but more importantly, on keeping the community intact.

209

Lugares comunes focuses on the neoliberal system from another angle; that of the discarded people who represent a challenge or even a critique to the system. According to

Avelar and following Beatriz Sarlo, the neoliberal system inherited from the military dictatorships transformed the intellectual into an easy-made media “expert” (Alegorías,

118). Those intellectuals are the ones who do not represent any threat. In that sense,

Fernando is expelled from his job, not because of the crisis, but because of his role as an intellectual. The discussion between Fernando and the rector after the former gets his letter of forced retirement illustrates this ideological clash:

FERNANDO: ¡No me dé consejos! […] Dígame que no le va a dar curso a la petición pero no me dé consejos. RECTOR: No le digo que no. Pero hay que valorar una serie de cuestiones para darle curso. Honestidad, capacidad, idoneidad, disciplina, ideología. FERNANDO: Hasta ahí veníamos bien. RECTOR: Bueno está bien, cada cual tiene derecho a pensar como quiera pero convengamos que a usted a veces se le va la mano. FERNANDO: Digo lo que pienso. RECTOR: Sí, sí, sí, no lo estoy censurando, pero a veces los objetivos y es ahí donde usted me falla. FERNANDO: Mi opinión solo puede ser subjetiva. Objetivos son los objetos y los rectores. RECTOR: ¿Y usted que es Robles? Porque me van a pedir un perfil suyo pero a la verdad no sé cómo definirlo. No es peronista, no es radical, no es nada. ¿Qué puedo poner en el informe? ¿Anarco? ¿Marxista? ¿Zurdo? Me suena antiguo. FERNANDO: Mejor ponga lo que no soy. No soy un inepto, no soy un corrupto, no me nombraron a dedo como a usted. RECTOR: Qué poco nivel viejo. Que pensemos distinto no le da derecho a insultar, ¿eh?

210

FERNANDO: No pensamos distinto. Usted no puede pensar distinto. La función de pensar es algo que su cerebro desconoce totalmente.

[FERNANDO: Don’t give me advice. […] Tell me you’ll ignore my request, but spare me of your advice. DEAN: I’m not saying no. But your request depends on certain things. Honesty, ability, suitability, discipline, ideology. FERNANDO: We were fine until just now. DEAN: Everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but sometimes you go too far. FERNANDO: I speak my mind. DEAN: Yes, I’m not censuring you. But sometimes you are not objective enough. FERNANDO: I can only be subjective. Objects and rectors are objective. DEAN: And what are you, Robles? You see, they’ll ask me to describe you, but I don’t know how. You are not a Peronist or a radical. You are nothing. What can I say in the report? An anarchist, a Marxist, a leftist? Sounds old-fashioned. FERNANDO: Say what I’m not. I’m not inept or corrupt. I wasn’t handpicked like you. DEAN: That’s hitting below the belt. We may think differently, but that doesn’t give you the right to insult. FERNANDO: No, we don’t think differently. You can’t think differently. Thinking is something your brain is incapable of.]

Fernando is an outcast because he does not fit in the system that he challenges. In fact, the neoliberal model is not intended for educated people, it prepares professionals; individuals trained for a specific job. Following the recipe of capitalism “a-la-extreme”, it compensates whoever specializes in a profession that produces in terms of quantity. In that sense, the figure of the intellectual becomes expendable, as its knowledge cannot be measured. At the same time, the intellectual who does not settle to be accommodated becomes the symbol of an alien that needs to be displaced, annulled and robbed of its

211

agency. The intellectual, the artist, the writer, the poet and the killer (Julian)74 are all symbols of the ostracized. In fact, Lugares comunes opens leveling the intellectual with the writer:

FERNANDO (V.O.) El escritor escribe. Si alguien quiere aprender a escribir podrá llegar a ser una persona que escribe. Pero nunca será un escritor. Según Raymond Chandler, entonces, soy un escritor ya que escribo. Me faltaría saber si escribo bien y si tengo estilo propio. El estilo no se busca, se tiene o no se tiene y no se sabe el por qué. Nadie mejor que yo sabrá si escribo bien. Vivo de eso. Vivo de criticar y analizar lo que otros han escrito. Enseño literatura. El íntimo menosprecio que siento por mí mismo alimenta mi autocrítica. No me será necesario esperar la aprobación de algún editor. Si esto que hoy comienzo resulta una basura o es solo mediocre, o no tiene la calidad que espero encontrar al leer obras ajenas y que siempre ha sido escasa, este manuscrito entonces nunca conocerla elegancia del Garamond o la vulgaridad de cualquier otro tipografía. […] No sé si lo que nos pasa es una historia que valga la pena contar. […] Hay un país que nos destruye, un mundo que nos expulsa, un asesino difuso que nos mata día a día sin que nos demos cuenta. No tengo una respuesta. Escribo desde el caos, desde el caos, en plena oscuridad.

[FERNANDO: The writer writes. Someone who learns to write can be a person who writes, but never a writer. So according to Raymond Chandler, I am a writer, since I write. But I don’t know if I write well or have my own style. You don’t look for a style. You have one or you don’t. No one knows why. I should know if I write well or not. I make a living from it. From reviewing and analyzing what others write. I teach literature. My own self-contempt nurses my self-criticism. I don’t need a publisher’s approval. If what I’ve started on turns out to be trash or mediocre, or lacks the quality I expect from other writers, which is rarely found, then this draft will never know the elegance of Garamond or the vulgarity of any other typography. […] I don’t know if our story is really worth the telling. […] There’s a country destroying us, a world expelling us, a sketchy killer

74 Julian could be understood as a political killer but, as I have mentioned, that is not the case. His intention to kill Videla is selfish and his “deus-ex-machina” is his alienation from society. He is an antisocial agent, the direct result of Videla. In that sense, Julian resembles a long trajectory in American film where the ostracized killer is an doppelganger of the artist, even related to high culture and art himself. Silence of the Lambs, The Talented Mr. Ripley, or terrorist like Tyler in Fight Club are a few examples.

212

killing us daily and we don’t realize it. I don’t have any answers. I write out of chaos, in deep darkness.]

His place as a reader and a writer makes an outsider out of him. As such, he is misplaced: threatened to be exiled out of his role in the world.

Another example of Fernando’s role is seen during his reflections upon literature.

Luppi’s Voice-Over quoting Alejandra Pizarnik’s “Lucidity” (“La lucidez”) underlines this knowledge:

FERNANDO (V.O.): La lucidez es un don y es un castigo. Está todo en la palabra. Lucido viene de Lucifer, el arcángel rebelde, el demonio, pero también se llama Lucifer el lucero del alba, la primera estrella, la más brillante, la última en apagarse. Lucido viene de Lucifer, Lucifer viene de luz y de Ferous, que quiere decir el que tiene luz, el que genera luz, el que trae la luz que permite la visión interior. El Bien y el Mal todo junto. El placer y el dolor. La lucidez es dolor, y el único placer que uno puede conocer, lo único que se parecerá remotamente a la alegría será el placer de ser consciente de la propia lucidez. “El silencio de la comprensión, el silencio del mero estar. En esto se van los años, en esto se fue la bella alegría animal.” Pizarnik. Genial.

[FERNANDO (V.O.): Lucidity is both a gift and a punishment. It’s all in one word. Lucid comes from Lucifer, the rebellious archangel, the Devil. And Lucifer is also the morning star, the first star, the brightest, the last to fade. Lucid comes from Lucifer, Lucifer from Lux and Ferous, meaning he who has light, who generates light, who brings the light allowing inner vision. Good and Evil together. Pain and pleasure. Lucidity is pain, and the only pleasure we can know, the only pleasure, remotely like joy, is that of being aware of our own lucidity. “The silence of understanding, the silence of merely being. There, the years go by. There, beautiful animal joy went.” Pizarnik. Brilliant.

Fernando is then both reader and writer, both reader and poet. Using Ranciére’s terminology, the Voice-Over underlines the connection between “the sayable and the visible” (The Future of the Image 6). The sequence is an image-sentence where both elements are brought together to stress the importance of the cinematic metaphor.

213

The relationship between art, artist and audience, as well as the relationship between writer and reader, is a worn-out space of discussion. In fact, it inherits the image of the (unique) artist – symbol of pure subjectivity – which was complicated later with the problem of language (or artistic medium). In many of her poems, Pizarnik herself used the topic of language and its relationship to writer and reader. Thus Aristarain is re- representing the problem in his film. If we are to give meaning to our contemporary world, it will be by re-appropriating it, by reading it, by giving new interpretations to the same problems. Is that sense it is impossible to escape common areas that presents us with the same challenges over and over:

FERNANDO: Las mejores preguntas son las que se vienen repitiendo desde los griegos. Muchas son lugares comunes pero no pierden vigencia. ¿Qué? ¿Cómo? ¿Dónde? ¿Cuándo? ¿Por qué? […]

[FERNANDO: The best questions are those which have been asked since the Greek Philosophers. Many have become clichés, but are still valid. What? How? Where? When? Why? […] ]

The challenge to homogenous discourses for/by the polis implies giving new interpretation to the same problems, hence, revisiting clichés in order to look for new answers.

In terms of filmmaking, the necessity of returning to those common areas is evident. David Bordwell has explained how the construction of film needs a familiar language in order to be understood. Even when a film tries to be “different” or challenging, it still needs an (cinematographic) order, a technological procedure, and a way of distribution that needs to be repeated (The Way Hollywood Tells It). In relation to

Lugares Comunes and the “New Argentinean Cinema”, the search for a new language implies a new perspective (a new reading) on how to present films and which themes to

214

embrace. However, the effort echoes the cinema before the dictatorship in terms of envisioning a fresh industry that rejects the previous national cinema. In that sense, the new attempts end up returning to a previous cinematic endeavor that was interrupted by the dictatorship, in other words, to a common ground.

The Voice-Over in Lugares Comunes also establishes a link with the role of writing-reader in El secreto de sus ojos. In fact, both films insist on a return to common ground in terms of finding new definitions of what has been already discussed. We have to bear in mind that there were previous attempts to portrait the dictatorship before the

“New Argentinean Cinema” that tended to be more melodramatic. Stantic’s Un muro de silencio (A Wall of Silence, 1993) changed that trend and placed an emphasis on reinterpretation. In that film, it was all about giving a voice to the disappeared within dramatic representation itself (on the stage). In that sense, the figure of the reader presented in Campanella’s and Aristarain’s films, is a continuation of that role of interpreter. Reader, intellectual, artist and art are then tied within these efforts of presenting a new voice that assumes an agency while inviting newer interpretations. It is an alternative figure that opens the door for the multiplicity of other voices that should be part of the polis.

The reader (Esposito) in El secreto de sus ojos stresses this importance of embracing those voices left out. However, the need to confront the past in Campanella’s film and act upon it relegates the actual book to a secondary place. The ending of the film is about the unresolved love-story, leaving aside any invocation literature. In that sense the film also goes back to a cinematographic cliché established by Hollywood: the happy ending (or guy gets girl).

215

The love story within the whole narrative of El secreto de sus ojos follows the narrative models that are characteristic of Hollywood, which according to Charles

Accland, dominate the film market worldwide. This aspect could be read as a form of

“American propaganda” and as Campanella as a follower of Hollywood parameters.

While this might be argued, El secreto de sus ojos is not just an attempt to imitate the cinematography style of the USA. Instead, the film incorporates a hybridity of genres which have been established by Hollywood. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, El secreto de sus ojos could be classified as a political film, as well as a comedy, a detective film, or a cop and sidekick buddy film. It can also be classified as a romantic story, which is what both opens and close the film plot-wise. Campanella’s film is all of these, following that hybridity represented successfully in American Films.

This hybridity is the reason why El secreto de sus ojos resonates and opens the door to the question of reception. The number of genres within the film aims to open more possibilities of attracting a bigger audience to watch it. The result was positive, both nationally and internationally. Taking into consideration the films analyzed in this chapter, El secreto de sus ojos was the most watched film in Argentina during 2010. It made 26,282,091 ARS,75 placing the film in the 100th position after taking Hollywood and international films in consideration.76 In terms of the international market, it made a

75 Data until October 4, 2009. < http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1305806/business?ref_=tt_dt_bus >

76 With respect to national films, it ranked fifth after Igualita a mí (The Same as Me, 2010), Carancho (2010), Dos Hermanos (Brother and Sister, 2010), and El hombre de al lado (The Man Next Door, 2009). Of these films, only Carancho is not a comedy. (Ultracine 2010: Anuario 2010, 2010)

216

successful run among foreign films, winning ten international awards and many other nominations.77 It also won an Academy Award for the “Best Foreign Film” category.

In that sense, the film achieves a broader political relevance. If there is a political intention to re-read a past that shaped the collective trauma still shared today, then the broader the audience, the better chances to incorporate this debate into the Argentine community. As a result, even when a film like Garage Olimpo is more critical and had a clearer political intention, El secreto de sus ojos provides a bigger opportunity to achieve a political reflection. With a broader audience and international recognition, the film opens a ger possibility of creating a political response that leads to action, since it is viewed by more people than an art-house film and than a documentary. In that sense,

Campanella uses fiction to narrate a history that can be read in different ways, while still within the logic of the world market. El secreto de sus ojos presents itself as both an escapist form of entertainment (a commodity) as well as a medium to provide an alternative voice within the polis, as if to say that, if art is a commodity, then one needs to exploit this aspect of modern aesthetics.

On the other hand, because El secreto de sus ojos can be considered as a multi- genre film (contrasting with the other films analyzed in this chapter), it defies the logics of the last junta within the system inherited since then. If the last dictatorship believed in imposing a homogenous discourse within the polis, Campanella defies it by representation, in other words, by presenting a heterogeneous representation within what is valid and “readable” in terms of global cinema. As a result, the film is submerged

77 Reference IMDB

217

within de-negotiation. It is art, which is a commodity, which has political effects, which also needs to “play the game” and sell. It needs to recover its investments, ensure a position in Argentinean film and in International Cinema, as well as be a continuation to the “New Argentine Cinema”. It is both an imitation of Hollywood’s model as well as a film that raises the questions analyzed earlier. Campanella is not the only example, as all of these films also open spaces of de-negotiation. However, Campanella’s film establishes a connection that clearly meant to surpass the national frontiers, inserting itself within the global dynamics of cinema.

218

CHAPTER 6:

CONCLUSION

Yo siempre he tenido una tendencia a poner distancia, o bien geográfica, o bien temporal en lo que escribo para poder apartarme y mirarlo con un poco más de, no sé si de objetividad porque no pretendo en ningún caso ser objetivo, mucho menos cuando uno escribe literatura, pero sí con más frialdad más[…] distancia. -Luisgé Martín

A mí la democracia me parece entretenida. Me parece algo atractivo. -José Tomás Urrutia

Estamos utilizando un lenguaje publicitario que es universal familiar, atractivo, optimista, pero armando un concepto político detrás. (Extract from No)

The violence that came as a result of the military regimes, the respective coups in the Southern Cone, and the tensions that lead to those coups continue to be a source of inspiration. Not only do they inspire for the appealing process of seeking judicatory justice, but also they inspire fiction. Post-modern aesthetics have been used as an instrument of retelling the past in a way that aims to challenge macro-narratives that were imposed by power. This methodology has opened new possibilities of using art – once again – as a political response, especially in literature and film. The novels and films analyzed in this dissertation use this approach to challenge pre-established notions of the

219

past, violently imposed by different military governments that shaped and traumatized both Chile and Argentina. These works focus on the political consequences on those respective nations. If the notions of identity were imposed by these governments to forward an economic model and to erase any dissidence, these novels and films question the notions of identity through the fictional representation of individual identities. The stories of the different characters are used as symbolic icons to make a political response through fiction, a response that criticizes the collective identities that remain to be linked directly with the past and that are part of both Chile and Argentina nowadays. The sense of being and how it is constructed through the use of different languages are at the core of the works analyzed in this dissertation.

However, because these are fictional representations they are offered as aesthetic reinterpretations of what was tried to be silenced and outcast from the polis. This notion of an outcast, which was the main target for the military governments, echoes the tensions of art as an alien part of the polis. Over and over again we find characters that are disconnected with the rest of society, or that become violent mirror-images of it. As a result, the romantic figure of the outcast is the ostracized other, a reflecting image of the

Agambean “homo sacer”, the one who had to be sacrificed for the rest of the polis. They don’t find a place in their communities and they are forced to be silenced either by their complicity or by their symbolic deaths. In terms of fictional film, La frontera (The

Border, 1991) in Chile was a pioneer of using an outcast (literally) character to respond to the Pinochet’s years through art. His portrait of the “frontier zone” has an aura of

Kafka feeling and influence, where the exiled seems to be stuck in a sort of limbo as a result of his (written) dissidence. As such, the use of an exiled character, much more

220

common in literature,78 has been crucial for dramatic films during the past fifteen years to question the notions of identity though the micro-narrative of their fictional plot, the past, the definition of nation (a fundamental discourse of the military regimes) and so on.

The use of the exiled or outsider links the works analyzed in this dissertation. This figure becomes the symbol – in its different manifestations – of the dissident voices that regimes attempted to be break and silence in order to impose a political agenda.

Following a Cold War discourse on the threat of “Marxism”, both Pinochet and the last junta in Argentina forwarded the Operation Condor while pushing the economic model of neoliberalism established by the Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, as documented by Naomi Klein. In that sense, both Chile and Argentina, as well as the rest of the

Southern Cone, served as the experiment to impose a neoliberal agenda that was impossible to set into practice in other countries. The economic struggle caused by external and internal factors during the Allende presidency, as well as the turmoil caused by radical groups from the left in Argentina, proved to be the perfect scenario to “justify” the different coups and put the economical model of free-market or new laissez-faire into practice – all in the name of peace and prosperity. Fear and empty slogans that now resound in Europe and the United States – words like “good versus evil”, “freedom”,

“terror” and “terrorist” to vilify the Other – were also used to silence the middle class

78 It would be a difficult task to identify the exact moment when these outcast figures were used in the Southern Cone’s literature. In fact, this archetype has been developed since modernism all over the Western Hemisphere. However, Manuel Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman) in 1976 and Ricardo Piglia in Argentina, as well as Eltit in Chile, are examples of writers who used these prototypes for their characters. However, like I mentioned, there is no particular moment when one can express that literature used more those detached characters. The film industry was more affected by the censorships of the military regimes given the more visible exposure a film needs to be produced. In Chile,for example, the whole industry was almost discontinued completely during the years of Pinochet.

221

while dosing them in the spectacle of the real. All in order to disengage and rob them of any intention of political action. The results are the creation of an entire polis whose only politics reside in responding to consumerism and immersing themselves in the society of spectacle, where even politics play an important role.

Art, therefore, became an instrument to resist during the years of oppressive government and during the reestablishment of democracy. Hence the importance of the outsider figure; it works as an example of opposition and resistance. A parallel example of that exiled figure presented in La frontera is the Argentinean film Un muro de silencio

(1993), where a foreigner named Kate Benson (Vanessa Redgrave) goes to Argentina to investigate and make a film about the disappeared. Another pioneer example would be

Un lugar en el mundo (1992), from Adolfo Aristarain. That film, were Federico Luppi incarnates the main character, makes a realistic approach of a (voluntary) exiled family from Buenos Aires who confronts the struggles of the people from the province. The film uses the figure of the exiled to move a narrative that consists in Mario (Luppi) and his farmer neighbors trying to resist the Spanish businessmen and their pressure to borrow all their land and transform it into houses and malls. In that sense, the movie portrayed what

Canclini named as the “Hispanoamericanization”, where Spain has expanded “ownership of publishing houses, airlines, banks, and telecommunications […] in Argentina, Brazil,

Colombia, Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela” (Hybrid Cultures xxxvi). However, the economic model, even though imposed by Spain during their early years in the European

Union, was the result of the political agendas shared in Argentina and Chile. This responds to the success, not of the neo-liberal economical model, which has proved to be a disaster in both countries, but in the imposition of such. Both Klein and Eduardo

222

Galeano have expressed this continuation of the model imposed by the military. This is the reason why most of the works analyzed in the dissertation deal with that past as a genesis to the realities of these two countries today.

The use of the exiled or “outsider” also establishes a parallel with the role of art within the contemporary polis. In fact, this has been a topic of discussion from different philosophers and critics since art and religion were “separated”. There needs to be a division from the work of art to be contemplated. In that sense, art symbolizes the ostracized per excellence; it is the icon of the Other. As such, it is no coincidence that it was taken out of the polis or censored during the implementation of those political and economical models.

However, even when art is just made for art’s sake (art pour l’art), there is a relationship of oppositional forces between art’s need for separation and its reinsertion into society: what I have defined as de-negotiation. In the case of the novels and films at hand, they try to embody the voice of those others that were silenced, all while being reinserted to the rules of global markets as commodities or products of consumption.

From that space the texts analyzed challenge both past and present while seeking for certain “success”, recognition for the artists and a bigger audience. That bigger audience is needed for economic reasons as well as for the need to spread the alternative voices to the political discourses that shaped these two countries.

Focusing on the narrative level, Un Lugar en el mundo is also a pioneer example of de-negotiation. On the one hand, and as I mentioned earlier, the film uses exiled main characters to build its narrative. On the other hand, it reinserts itself into the polis with its plot of land-owner against multinationals. We have to take into consideration that the

223

film was released during the Menem presidency which implanted a neoliberal agenda that caused the economical clash at the beginning of the last decade. Therefore the film is a predecessor for a film like Matar a Videla or even Lugares comunes, by the same director. There is a political response from fiction to the events affecting the country at that same moment.

The insistence of using fiction in the cases examined and art in general in order to make a commentary of the real happenings in a specific country or community is not new, and is not specific to either Argentina or Chile. The contemporary aspect of de- negotiation in art corresponds to our global reality and the complexities that result from the use of art in the polis. In that sense, the relevant questions analyzed in this dissertation, as well as how art can or cannot respond to the political sphere, are transnational phenomena that surpass the countries analyzed and the Southern Cone.

However, it is this region, and specially the case of Chile and its long dictatorship, which opens the analysis to a transatlantic analysis that includes Europe, and more specifically, Spain. It was Judge Baltasar Garzón who indicted Pinochet and ordered his arrest in London, in opposition to the considerable group of Chileans who still supported the general. The charges were of crimes against humanity, erasing therefore any claim of national sovereignty and opening a collaboration between the Southern Cone and Spain that complicated the “Hispanoamericanization” mentioned by Canclini. Instead, and using another term from Canclini, the relationship between Spain and Latin America, or

Chile and Argentina in this case, became hybrid from that moment on. On the one hand,

Spain is and has been the ambassador of a neoliberal agenda that would not have been possible without the experiments of the Chicago Boys, so well portrayed in Aristarain’s

224

film. On the other hand, Spain opens the gate to the search for juridical justice on account of the crimes committed during the dictatorships, especially in Chile.79 As a result,

Garzón used Pinochet’s case to later investigate the crimes committed during Spain’s own dictatorship, which cost him a suspension from the CGPJ (Consejo General del

Poder Judicial). In other words, Pinochet’s case was used as a precedent to try to resolve

Spain’s own history of violence.

Logically, Spain has a common history with Latin America because of the latter’s colonization. The results are obvious in terms of points of convergence between language and culture. However, the history of both Spain and Latin America has been very violent during the last century, even though that violence emerged from different causes. The phenomena of “caudillismo” and the establishment of different dictatorships were common experiences in both regions. In terms of the Southern Cone, the “threat” of

Communism to justify the coups links Spain’s pre-Cold War paranoid discourse. In fact, in Spain leftist forms of government, including republicanism, was known as “the Red

Terror”.

The circumstances that led to Franco’s coup in Spain are a little different from those of Chile and Argentina, as they respond to the antecedents of the Second World

War. In fact, according to Paul Preston, the dictatorship of Francisco Franco was an ally of the Axis in its early years (Politics of Revenge 37). However, because of the fragile condition of Spain after the Civil War, Franco could not get directly involved in the

79 By the time Garzón ordered Pinochet’s arrest in London, the dictatorship of the last junta in Argentina was long gone. Videla and some of the generals were already prosecuted and pardoned by Menem. However, according to Klein, Garzón did make a reference to Argentina’s case and categorized as genocide the crimes of the last junta. (102)

225

expansionist plans of the Axis powers. As a result, Spain was not considered a direct threat to the United States and its allies, which allowed Franco to stay in power after the war was over. In that era and with the beginning of the Cold War, Franco used a discourse about his government being able to resist and repel communism. In other words, history placed Franco with the West in the struggle of the Cold War, a war that, as

I have mentioned before, was used later as an excuse for the dictatorships in the South, right at the end of Franco’s dictatorship. Therefore, Spain and the Southern Cone share the rethorical use of anti-communism as a method of legitimization.

That link has also been explored in art recently. While Argentina’s film representations antagonize with Spain as an Imperial antagonist in films like Un lugar en el mundo and Lugares Comunes, Eltit’s Jamás el fuego nunca establishes a link between the Chilean context and Franco’s dictatorship (12). However, I consider Luisgé Martín’s novel Las manos cortadas to be a key novel to open a direct transnational analysis of art as a response of politics in the contemporary world. The novel is an iconic dialogue between Spain, Chile and Latin America, beginning with the title, which is an echo of the iconic Latin-American book of Eduardo Galeano’s Las manos abiertas de

Latinoamérica.

Written in 2009, Las manos cortadas is the writer’s first attempt to compose a novel about politics. Las manos cortadas is in fact a novel about a Spanish writer

(Martín’s alter-ego) who is contacted by a mystery character (Patricio) to give him some letters that were supposedly written by Salvador Allende. Those letters reveal the intention of an armed revolution beneath the elected government and a truce with Fidel

Castro to receive guns for those ends. The importance of the letters moving the narrative

226

is that they would uncover Allende’s “true face” and destroy his image of a pacifist martyr of socialism (the icon to achieve this project without violence).

The novel establishes a connection with the same topics discussed in the works analyzed so far and, at the same time, opens a possibility to consider new elements when thinking about how literature responds today to a violent past and to global politics. First and foremost, the novel is about the interpretation of Chile (past and present) though the eyes of a foreigner. Once again the reader encounters an alternative figure, the figure, not of an exiled, but of an Other which is separated by geographical distance and nationality.

Therefore, there is an insistence of a separation between writer (who reads) and polis, where he is reinserted by the investigation of the letter’s veracity. Second, there is an insistence in understanding the past to understand the polis (Chile) today. Therefore, even though the fictional Luisgé is in present Chile and in the middle of a series of misfortunes that begin with a murder, the letters and his investigation dwell on the iconic figures that link present and past in Chile: Allende and Pinochet. As a result, there is a retelling of the past that, once again, renounces any definite notion of truth. The novel mixes fictional characters with fictional interpretations of historical characters. The writer becomes a fictional interpretation of himself, as open the novel considering writing a political novel as a detective story; “with the style of a detective story novel – as ordered by my editor and my literary agents so I can grasp a broader audience” (“Con estilo de novela policial

– como me habían pedido siempre mi editora y mis agentes literarios para poder llegar a la sensibilidad de más lectores”) (15). The reader thus meets with a double of Luisgé; the actual writer and himself as a character. The meta-fictional aspect of the novel (present in the film Y las vacas vuelan and, to some extent, in Bolaño’s alter-ego of Arturo Belano in

227

Los detectives salvajes), opens another aspect that I have not explored in depth but that is important in understanding how contemporary fiction responds to the contemporary world. In fact, the link of the Southern Cone with contemporary literature and film in

Spain asks for an analysis of this fictional tool of metafiction, which is so common among the writers of Martín’s generation.

Many of the recent novels that deal with Spain’s past and, more specifically, with the Civil War (which is the traumatic event in Spain), use meta-fiction to develop their respective narratives. Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis), both the novel and its film representation, Mala gente que camina (Walking Evil People) and Otra maldita novela sobre la Guerra Civil (Another Damn Novel about the Civil War), are just some of the most recent examples that use this fictional technique. The function of meta-fiction in these texts invites aself-reflection that goes from the writer as a figure, to the nation.

Once again, the use a representational pattern that goes from the private or individual, to the collective identity.

On the other hand, these novels are also tied with other films that make a political response that either uses metafiction, such as La mala educación (2004) and Salvajes

(Savages, 2001), or that move their narratives without using that approach. Libertarias

(Freedom Fighters, 1996), Los lunes al sol (Mondays in the Sun, 2002) and Biutiful

(2010) are some of the most recent examples of movies with a political comment without using metafiction.

However, a novel such as Las manos cortadas opens the possibility to link the analysis of fiction as a political response with metafiction and how that instrument is used, at least in the novel, to stress the importance of fiction. The insistence of fiction

228

underlines an insistence on a detachment from the polis. However, and at the same time, the blending of writer and character blur the same divisions between fiction and polis, as well as the lines between the latter and what is considered to be real. This means that the use of that artistic instrument can also be thought of as a de-negotiating instrument.

Evenmore, meta-fiction in this novel highlights the importance of of the tention between fiction and polis; it makes a direct invitation to make a political response from the space of literature.

That de-negotiation goes beyond narrative, too. As I mentioned earlier, metafiction has been a common tool of Spanish novelists during the past decade. That shared element, as well as the use of the characteristics of a detective novel (which ties this work with Los detectives salvajes and Ricardo Piglia’s work in Argentina), places

Las manos cortadas (The Sliced Hands) in the same position between being a novel with a political critique and being a commodity to sell. That aspect of what is now considered as the literature business is even part of the narrative, as the editor pays fictional Luisgé to go to Chile and present his previous book.

De-negotiation makes it hard to separate these two aspects and, in fact, make them necessary of each other in order to broaden the message, if there is such an intention. No, the last film in Larraín’s trilogy sets its narrative between these tensions.

On the one hand, there is the serious threat of Pinochet winning reelection for eight more years (which will then take care of the people behind the “no” campaign), and the necessity of convincing voters to do something they were not used to do anymore, the political action of voting (no). At the end, René Saavedra (Gael García Bernal), the main character and a successful publicist, pushes for a friendly campaign, one that uses the

229

commercial elements of publicity to sell the concept of “happiness”. This “empty message”, that presents the reality of democracy in the west as a product, is the main reason for tension with the political parties of the left. These groups refused to participate in what they considered to be a lessening of evil and the pain that they suffered as a result of the oppressive government of Pinochet. The film is then another example of the tensions of de-negotiation in the global world. These tensions open questions of impact and limitation, of audience and message, and of which means are important to achieve political changes. In that sense, the film will prove to be essential to analyze past (the previous two films analyzed in this dissertation) and present, and how we can move from there. As such, it also works as a link with Spain and films that, beyond a representation of the past, offer the complicated panorama that global representation and the hybrid dynamics shown in a film like Biutiful, to name an example, or even Pan’s Labyrinth

(2006), which expands the connections further. No is essential to expand the need for a transnational analysis that goes beyond the two countries analyzed so far. Such an investigation and others would be necessary to understand how art changes with today’s interactive context.

230

BIBLIOGRAPHY

8½. Dir. Federico Fellini. Criterion 2001, 1963. DVD.

Los Abrazos Rotos. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Canal+España, 2009. DVD.

Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.

Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1997. Print.

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry”. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 120-168. Print.

---. The Culture Industry. London & New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.

---. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 2005. Print.

Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Florence: Casa editrice G. Nerbini, 1961. Print.

Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. Alastair Reid trans. London: Everyman’s Library, 2005. Print.

Amago, Samuel. True lies : narrative self-consciousness in the contemporary Spanish novel. Lewisburg : Bucknell University Press, 2006. Print.

American Beauty. Dir. Sam Mendes. DreamWorks Home Entertainment, 2000, 1999. DVD.

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago & London: University of Chicago P, 1998. Print.

---. The Promise of Politics. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. Print.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised and expanded edition. London: Verso, 1983. Print.

Arenillas, María. “Time Set in Stone: Memory and Space in Postdictatorship Argentina and Uruguay”. Diss. U. of Notre Dame, 2010. Print.

231

Au revoir les infants. Dir. Louis Malle. Criterion. 2006, 1987. DVD.

Avelar, Idelber. Alegorías de la derrota: La ficción postdictatorial y el trabajo del duelo. Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2000. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Stephen Heath, trans. “The Death of the Author”. Image-Music-Text. USA: Noonday P, 1988. 142-148. Print.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schoken Books, 1968. Print.

Biutiful. Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu. Roadside Attractions. 2011, 2010. DVD.

Bolaño, Roberto. Los detectives salvajes. Barcelona: Anagrama, 1998. Print.

---. The Savage Detectives. Natasha Wimmer, trans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Print.

Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells it: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California P, 2006. Print.

“Box Office/ Business for The Secret in Their Eyes” IMDb. 1 October 2013. Web.

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1984. Print.

Cercas, Javier. Soldados de Salamina. Barcelona: TusQuets Editores, 2001. Print.

Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Universal Studios, 2007. DVD.

Chomsky, Noam. Profit Over People. Robert W. McChesney, Introduction. New York: Seven Stories P, 1999. Print.

Combs, James. Movies and Politics: The Dynamic Relationship. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. Print.

Costamagna, Alejandra. Cansado ya del sol. Santiago: Planeta, 2002. Print.

Dandan, Alejandra. ‘Distinguía día y noche por los ladridos’, El País, September 7 2010, p. 14. Print.

Derbyshire, Philip. “Los detectives salvajes: Line, Loss and the Political.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. 18.2 (2009): 167-176. Print.

Donoso Pinto, Catalina. Películas que escuchan: Reconstrucción de la identidad en once filmes chilenos y argentinos. Buenos Aires: Corregidor, 2007. Print.

Dorfman, Ariel. La muerte y la doncella. México D.F.: Seix Barral, 1995. Print.

232

---. Death and the Maiden. New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Print.

Downing, John D. H. Ed. Film & Politics in the Third World. New York: Praeger, 1987. Print.

Eltit, Diamela. Jamás el fuego nunca. Santiago: Planeta, 2007. Print.

---. Tres Novelas. D.F.: Centro de cultura económica, 2004. Print.

Estudillo, Luis Martín, and Robert Ampuero, eds. Post-Authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America’s Southern Cone. Nashville: Vandervilt UP, 2008. Print.

Falcoff, Mark. "Kissinger & Chile: The Myth That Will Not Die." Commentary, 116.4 (2003): 41-49. Print.

Feinmann, José Pablo. Peronismo. Filosofía política de una obstinación argentina. . Web.

Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2002. DVD.

Fischer, Michael. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. 194-233. Print.

Forster, Ricardo. Crítica y sospecha: Los claroscuros de la cultura moderna. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003. Print.

Foucault, Michel. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. Print.

---.“Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias.” 1967. Web.

---. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Print.

---. Power/Knowledge. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Paranoia y neurosis obsesiva. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2002. Print.

---. Totem y tabú. Quinta edición. Madrid: 2003. Print.

Galeano, Eduardo. Las venas abiertas de América Latina. Tercera edición. D.F.: Siglo XXI, 2008. Print.

---. Ser Como Ellos tros Art culos. Madrid: Siglo I de España Editores, 2006. Print.

233

Garaje Olimpo. Dir. Marco Bechis. Studio, 1999. DVD.

García Canclini, Nestor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1995. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 173-187. Print.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005. Print.

Hermanas. Dir. Julia Solomonoff. Studio, 2005. DVD.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. Print.

---.The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.

Kaminsky, Amy. “Marco Bechis’ Garage Olimpo: Cinema of Witness.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. No. 48. Winter 2006. Web. Kamisky, Gregorio. Escrituras interferidas: Singularidad, resonancias, propagación. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2000. Print.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2007. Print.

Kohan, Martín. Ciencias Morales. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2007. Print.

---. Dos veces junio. Buenos Aires: Debolsillo, 2005. Print.

---. Museo de la revolución. Buenos Aires: Mondadori, 2006. Print.

---. School for Patriots. Nick Caistor, trans. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012.

Lemebel, Pedro. Tengo miedo torero. Santiago: Editorial Planeta Chilena, 2004. Print.

La flor de mi secreto. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. CiBy 2000, 1996. DVD.

La frontera. Dir. Ricardo Larraín. Cine XXI, 2000. DVD.

La historia oficial. Dir. Luis Puenzo. Argentina: Cinemania, 1985. DVD.

Libertarias. Dir. Vicente Aranda. Studio, 1996. DVD.

Los lunes al sol. Dir. Fernando León de Aranoa. Sogepaq, 2002. DVD.

234

Los girasoles Ciegos. Dir. José Luis Cuerda. Estudios Organizativos y Proyectos Cinematográficos, 2008. DVD.

Los rubios. Dir. Albertina Carri. Studio, 2003. DVD.

Lost in la Mancha. Dir. Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe. Quixote Films 2002. DVD.

Lyotard, Jean François. The Posmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1979. Print.

Machuca. Dir. Andrés Wood. Menemsha Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

Maier, Elizabeth. Las madres de los desaparecidos ¿Un nuevo mito materno en América Latina? Colegio de la frontera: México D.F., 2001. Print.

La mala educación. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Canal + España, 2004. DVD.

La noche de los lápices. Dir. Héctor Olivera. Aries Cinematográfica Argentina, 1986. DVD.

Marlow, Jonathan. “The Art of Filmmaking: Pablo Larrain”. Fandor. Web. 6 Dec. 2013

Martín-Estudillo, Luis, and Roberto Ampuero. Post-authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America's Southern Cone. Nashville, Tenn: Vanderbilt University Press, 2008. Print.

Martín, Luisgé. Las manos cortadas. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2009. Print.

Martin, Virginia C. “El diálogo de la memoria en El común olvido.” Actas del III coloquio nacional de investigadores en estudios del discurso. ALED. (Asociación Latinoamérica de Estudios del discurso). N.D. Print.

The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski. Warner Brothers, 1999. DVD.

Méndez, Alberto. Los girasoles ciegos. Madrid: Anagrama, 2008. Print.

--- Blind Sunflowers. Nick Caistor, trans. Arcadia Books: Mount Pleasant, 2009.

Missing. Dir. Costa-Gavras. PolyGram, 1982. DVD.

Molloy, Silvia. El común olvido. Buenos Aires: Editorial Norma, 2002. Print.

Montecinos, Hector. Personal Interview. 23 Mar 2011.

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. Globalization & Culture: Global Mélange. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004. Print.

235

Negri, Antonio, and Giuseppe Cocco. Global: Biopoder y luchas en una América latina globalizada. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2006. Print.

Negri, Antonio, and César Altamira, Alejandro Horowicz. Diálogo sobre la globalización, la multitud y la experiencia argentina. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003. Print.

Nelsen, Aaron, “After the Miner’s Triumph: How Chile’s President lost his Mojo” Time. 6 Dec. 2013

Nouzeilles, Gabriella. “Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios.” Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 December 2005. Pp. 263-278. Print.

Olivera-Williams, María Rosa. “La década del 70 en el Cono Sur: Discursos nostálgicos que recuerdan la revolución y escriben la historia.” Romance Quaterly 2009, Vol.57(1), p.43-62. Print.

Pearl Harbor. Michael Bay. Touchstone Pictures, 2001. DVD.

Poniatowska, Elena (trans. by Lane, Helen R.), Massacre in Mexico, New York: Viking, 1975.

Poulsen, Stinne Krog. “History, Memory and Nostalgia.” Cinemascope: Independent Film Journal, Year V, Issue 13 July-December, 2009. Print.

Piglia, Ricardo. Blanco nocturno. Barcelona : Anagrama, 2010. Print.

---. La ciudad ausente. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1992. Print.

Prado, Benjamín. Mala gente que camina. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2008. Print.

Preston, Paul. Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in Twentieth-Century Spain. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Puig, Manuel. El beso de la mujer araña. 3rd. Ed. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982. Print.

Rajchman, John.Ed. The Identity in Question. New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. New York: Verso, 2007. Print.

---. The Politics of Aesthetics. London: Continuum, 2006. Print.

Ravaschino, Guillermo. ‘Garage Olimpo’, Cineismo.com. 26 Oct 2010. Web.

Richard, Nelly. Fracturas de la memoria: arte y pensamiento crítico. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2007.

236

Rodowick, David Norman. The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois P, 1988. Print.

Rosa, Icaac. Otra maldita novela sobre la Guerra Civil. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral, 2007. Print.

Rosenstone, Robert. Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History. Cambridge: Harvard, 1995. Print.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Print.

---. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print.

Salvajes. Dir. Carlos Molinero. Studio, 2001. DVD.

Soldados de Salamina. Dir. David Trueba. Studio, 2003. DVD.

Star Wars Trilogy. Dir. George Lucas. 20th Century Fox Entertainment, 2004. DVD.

Savater, Fernando. La tarea del héroe: elementos para una ética trágica. Madrid: Taurus, 1982. Print.

Sepúlveda, Luis. Historias marginales. Buenos Aires: Booket, 2007. Print.

Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Solanas, Fernando & Octavio Gettino. “Towards a Third Cinema”. Film Theory and Criticism: Introduction Readings. Leo Braudy Ed. New York: 2004. Print.

Smith, Paul Julian. “At the Edge of History”. Film Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 12-3. Print.

Steiner, George. Gramáticas de la creación. Trad. Andoni Alonso y Carmen Galán Rodríguez. Madrid: Ediciones Siruela, 2001. Print.

---. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman. Print.

Taylor, Ronald, ed. Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 1977. Print.

Therborn, Göran. From Marxism to Post-Marxism? New York: Verso, 2008. Print.

Tierra. Dir. Julio Medem. Lolafilms, 1996. DVD.

Tomándote. Dir. Isabel Gardela. Kilimanjaro Productions, 2000. DVD.

Un lugar en el mundo. Dir. Adolfo Aristarain. Studio, 1993. DVD.

Un muro de silencio. Dir. Lita Stantic. Aleph Productiones, 1993. DVD.

237

Ultracine 2010: Anuario 2010. Print.

Una década de Nuevo Cine Argentino (1995-2005): Industria, crítica, formación estéticas. Ignacio Amatriain, coord. Buenos Aires: Ediciones CICCUS, 2009. Print.

Vacas. Dir. Julio Medem. Departamento de Cultura del Gobierno Vasco, 1992. DVD.

Wolin, Shaldon. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008. Print.

Y las vacas vuelan. Dir. Fernando Lavanderos. Duende Films, 2004. DVD.

Yoshimoto,"The Difficulty of Being Radical: The Discipline of Film Studies and the Post-Colonial World Order". Boundary 2. Print.

Yuste, Miguel. ‘Muere en atentado el jefe de la policía argentina’ El País, 19 June 1976. Web. Zizek, Slavoj. For They Know Not What They Do. London; New York: Verso, 1996. Print.

---.Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London; New York: Verso, 2002. Print.

Padgett, Tim. “Rebuilding Chile: Harder than Recuing Miners?”, Time. 7 Dec. 2013

238