TORTURE, FICTION, AND THE REPETITION OF HORROR: GHOST-WRITING THE PAST IN ALGERIA AND ARGENTINA Torture, Fiction and the Repetition of Horror: Ghost-writing the Past in Algeria and Argentina The object of this thesis is to study the attempts made by writers and filmmakers in two very different socio-cultural contexts to depict and elucidate the experience of political violence, particularly torture, in the periods 1954-1962 and 1976-1983. I seek to apply the hypotheses of Anglo-American and French theorists with an interest in historical representation, as well as trauma, to both ‘realist’ and experimental accounts of the widespread oppression that occurred during the Algerian war of independence and later during the so-called ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina. The texts analysed in detail include novels and short stories by Kateb Yacine, Assia Djebar, Julio Cortázar and Luisa Valenzuela; the films I examine most closely are the Algerian-Italian ‘docudrama’ La Bataille d’Alger and the Argentine melodrama La historia oficial. However, the thesis also addresses other non- factual portrayals of brutality, such as the Nouvelle Vague’s meditations on decolonization, and autobiographical writings, such as military memoirs and survivors’ testimony, as a means of elaborating more fully on the issues at stake in the works cited above. It explores the difficulty – and the possibility – of giving voice to histories that simultaneously resist and demand articulation, and ultimately, of reconstituting the fragmented or ‘disappeared’ subject through narrative: of using fiction to summon the ‘ghosts’ of the past. Qu’est-ce qu’une violence qu’on appelle torture? Où commence-t-elle? Où finit- elle? Qu’est-ce qu’une souffrance infligée ou reçue dans ce cas? Quel est son corps, son fantasme, son symbole…? Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre CONTENTS List of Illustrations Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION First clipping (Denuncia) Second clipping (France-Soir) 1. KATEB YACINE OR THE SPECTRES OF A PAST TO COME Towards a ‘hauntology’ of Algeria Here and then: Nedjma Whose ghost? 2. REBIRTH IN SORROW: LA BATAILLE D’ALGER Context/contra-text ‘La première grande production Algérienne’ What does Algeria want? 3. ASSIA DJEBAR, SPEAKING TO THE LIVING DEAD La stratégie-femme (i) La stratégie-femme (ii) ‘Is this your – buried treasure?’ 4. ON LUISA VALENZUELA AND ‘PETRONILLA DE HEATH’ A phantom proof society Journeys in the unknown: Como en la guerra Restitutio ad integrum? 5. LA HISTORIA OFICIAL: WHERE THE CAMERA TIPS THE CRADLE Oblivion and its antonyms ‘En el país de Nomeacuerdo’ Inhabiting the ‘grey zone’? CONCLUSION APPENDIX: TRANSLATIONS FROM THE SPANISH Bibliography Filmography LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. La Jetée: Time-travelling. 2. Muriel ou le temps d’un retour: ‘Elle … était au fond, avec les munitions’. 3. Algiers, 1957: Yacef Saadi and his operatives. 4. La Bataille d’Alger: Look-alikes. 5, 6, 7, 8. La Bataille d’Alger: Scenes of torture. 9. Larba, 1957: ‘C’est un frère qui m’a prêté son arme’. 10, 11. Buenos Aires, 1983: Around the Plaza de Mayo. 12. Un muro de silencio: E.S.M.A., 1990. 13. Últimas imagenes del naufragio: ‘El colectivo se llena de muertos’. 14. San Isidro, 1984: Contents of one baby’s exhumed coffin. 15. La historia oficial: Alicia goes through Gaby’s original belongings. 16. La historia oficial: ‘No quedó nada, nada. Estas […] fotos solamente’. 17, 18. La historia oficial: Re-living violence. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My greatest debt is to Nick Harrison and Geoffrey Kantaris, who have been friends to me, as well as supervisors. I should also like to thank Hugo Azérad, Andrew Brown, James Campbell, Damian Catani, Martin Crowley, Marino Guida, Simon King, Jan Lauritzen, Robin Tomlinson, Robin Walker and, especially, Andrew Phillips, Caroline Phillips and Kathryn Robson. This Ph.D. was funded, in the first instance, by the Arts and Humanities Research Board; a Junior Research Fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge enabled me to continue writing into a fourth year. It is dedicated to my family. INTRODUCTION FIRST CLIPPING (DENUNCIA) Julio Cortázar’s short story, ‘Recortes de prensa’, tells of a woman writer who is asked to compose a text to accompany a set of sculptures on the theme of political violence, and specifically, torture. When she visits the sculptor’s house, she is relieved to discover that his oeuvre is quasi-abstract in expression, that no writhing bodies have been chiselled, explicitly, from the stone: Me gustó que en el trabajo del escultor no hubiera nada de sistemático o demasiado explicativo, que cada pieza constuviera algo de enigma y que a veces fuera necesario mirar largamente para comprender la modalidad que en ella asumía la violencia; las esculturas me parecieron al mismo tiempo ingenuas y sutiles, en todo caso sin tremendismo ni extorsión sentimental. Incluso la tortura, esa forma última en que la violencia se cumple en el horror de la inmovilidad y el aislamiento, no había sido mostrada con la dudosa minucia de tantos afiches y textos y películas que volvían a mi memoria también dudosa, también demasiado pronta a guardar imágenes y devolverlas para vaya a saber qué oscura complacencia. Pensé que si escribía el texto que me había pedido el escultor, si escribo el texto que me pedís, le dije, será un texto como esas piezas, jamás me dejaré llevar por la facilidad que demasiado abunda en ese terreno (I).1 Although I had not read Cortázar’s story when I began my project, it articulates, in precise terms, the response I first had, confronted with the novels and the films which are the subject of this thesis, novels and films which ‘speak’ too of acute pain. I should, 1 ‘Recortes de prensa’, in Queremos tanto a Glenda (Mexico City: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1983; repr. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara, 1996), pp. 65-82 (pp. 66-67). The Roman numeral given in brackets before the footnote number is a reference to my appendix of translations, which provides an English version of every Spanish- language quotation used in this thesis, in order of appearance. therefore, like to take ‘Recortes de prensa’ as my ‘framing device’ or my lead-in, a guide and introduction in itself to the studies I propose. The three authors discussed in depth here – the Algerians Kateb Yacine and Assia Djebar, and the Argentinean Luisa Valenzuela – address the modality of inflicted suffering like the fictive sculptor, obliquely, couching allusions to unbroken torment in disjointed syntax, rendering direct aggression in indirect prose. The two directors whose works I examine – Gillo Pontecorvo, an Italian, and Luis Puenzo, an Argentine – suggest a host of horrors with the merest gesture towards anguish, the merest glimpse, to quote Cortázar again, ‘de cuerpos y [de] cabezas, de brazos y de manos’ (II).2 All, in some measure, resist easy interpretation, defy any attempt to effect a simple summary: of structure, of character and even, on occasion, of plot. All, in some measure, demand that they be glossed in conjunction with less abstruse sources: with bald, historical, and even, on occasion, forthright accounts. After inspecting the pieces in the studio for an instant, Noemí, writer–viewer in ‘Recortes’, gets out a clipping from the Spanish press. That clipping (which she insists the sculptor scans ‘aloud’) is an open letter from one Laura Beatriz Bonaparte Bruschtein, ‘domiciliada’, the latter tells us, ‘en Atoyac, número 26, distrito 10, Colonia Cuauhtémoc, México 5’ (p. 67, III). And whilst this initial assertion of identity seems also an avowal of subjectivity, whilst Laura Bruschtein is – we discover – related to the individuals whose demise she will detail, the letter nonetheless reads ‘in the style of an affidavit, […] a [judicial] deposition’.3 To be more exact, it reads in the style of the ‘Urgent Action’ appeals issued by non-governmental organizations, by Amnesty International, by Americas and Human Rights Watch. Bruschtein’s missive proves, as Richard Wilson observes of such ‘legalistic’ documents, unflinchingly realist, ‘bluntly recount[ing] one fact after another in an unmitigated and relentless barrage of short case summaries’.4 Hecho: A las diez de la mañana del 24 de diciembre de 1975 fue secuestrada por personal del Ejército argentino (Batallón 601) en su puesto de trabajo [Aída Leonora Bruschtein Bonaparte] […] Hecho: el 11 de junio de 1976, a las 12 de mediodía, llegan [al] departamento de [Santiago Bruschtein] […] un grupo 2 Ibid, p. 66. Further references to the Alfaguara edition are given after quotations in the text. 3 Aníbal González, ‘“Press Clippings” and Cortázar’s Ethics of Writing’, in Julio Cortázar: New Readings, ed. Carlos J. Alonso, Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature, 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 237-257 (p. 241). 4 ‘Representing Human Rights Violations: Social Contexts and Subjectivities’, in Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Richard A. Wilson (London: Pluto Press, 1997), pp. 134-160 (p. 149). de militares vestidos de civil. […] Le obligaron a levantarse, y […] lo subieron a un automóvil. […] Hecho: El día 11 de marzo de 1977, a las 6 de la mañana, llegaron al departamento donde vivían [Irene Mónica Bruschtein Bonaparte de Ginzberg y su marido, Mario Ginzberg] fuerzas conjuntas del Ejército y la policía, llevándose a la pareja y dejando a sus hijitos: Victoria, de dos años y seis meses, y Hugo Roberto, de un año y seis meses, abandonados en la puerta del edificio (pp. 67-72, IV). Nothing persists that might displace attention from the disappearance around which each résumé is configured; physical ‘lacunae’ are paralleled by the textual evacuation of tropes, metaphors and authorial voice. For critics, and for the characters, this dispassionate report of abduction calls into question the efficacy of other less ‘literalist’ answers to abuses, casts doubt upon the adequacy of artistic protest where human life is under threat.