Re-collecting the Past: Memory and Literature as Historical Intervention
Humanities
LTWL 190A; Migrancy: Narratives of Displacement
The military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile violently ruled over its citizens, censoring anyone that they deemed as a threat to their system. Censorship was conducted surreptitiously, in order to pragmatically wipe out dissent, while maintaining a façade of national dignity. State repression came in the form of illegal arrests, secret detention centers, torture, and “disappearance.” A dearth of documentation detailing this repression naturally followed in the wake of such clandestine operations. Therefore, reconstructing a historical account by analyzing conventional forms of evidence proves rather difficult. The knowledge that we have of these crimes survives mainly in the minds of those who were present. Memory, in this capacity, becomes an indispensable site for publicly reconstructing what happened. However, many of these experiences can be classified as traumatic and difficulty in organizing traumatic memory on a linguistic level is one of its characteristic features. That ability to organize those experiences into words is necessary for recovery. In this paper, I suggest that literary fiction can help elicit traumatic memories, where they can then be voiced (or inscribed) into a public forum, and counter the State-perpetuated narrative(s) of silence. Literature has the capacity to exceed historiographical conventions and can open up a space for the disempowered victims of State violence to enter a public dialogue and regain their agency in historical production. I focus on Chilean author Ariel Dorfman’s play, Death and the Maiden, showing how as a text functioning in the real world it points out the prevailing silences in post-Pinochet Chile. I also examine the play as an allegory of different narratives competing for a place of supremacy in the collective imagination. Dorfman’s play is particularly valuable for the emphasis that he places on memory as a critical site, necessary for engraving a counter-narrative against hegemonic discourses and institutions.
