Violence and Bodies under Siege in the Works of Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane and Fátima Sime

Introduction

Myriad texts, images and events come to mind when thinking about violence: Homer's Illiad, the Old Testament, las Casas's Brevísima destrucción, Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange, 2666's "La parte de los crímenes"; Picasso's "Guernica," "La haine," Tarantino's films, "Breaking Bad"; slavery (both past and present), the Armenian Genocide, the two world wars, the Holocaust, the death and disappearance of thousands of political prisoners under many dictatorships the world over, the Rwanda Genocide, drug trafficking, Guantánamo, CIA torture of terror suspects, sexual assault on college campuses, ISIS, the recent killings of unarmed black men by white policemen in the United States, the assassination and disappearance of forty three students in the town of Iguala, Mexico, among many, many others acts. "No one engaged in thought about history and politics can remain unaware of the enormous role violence has always played in human affairs" (8), wrote Hannah Arendt some forty years ago.¹ Now, if violence is defined as "the exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse" ("Violence"), one would probably have to include the violence exerted upon millions and millions of chickens, pigs, cows and other animals for the purpose of human consumption. But, of course, violence is not simply, and not always, "the exertion" of physical force. Sometimes it is the threat of exertion of physical force. From this perspective, the entire colonizing enterprise of countries such as Portugal, Spain, England, France and others could well be conceived of as having imposed a perennial state of violence upon subjugated peoples. Similarly, wasn't modernity a kind of violence, as some have claimed?² Did it not, in its very being, conceal a potential violent thrust, as Adorno and Horkheimer warned? (Horkheimer and Adorno). Isn't capitalism, after all, also a kind of violence? Finally, the aforementioned "exertion" is not always "physical," sometimes it is psychological (as, for example, in the case of micro aggressions). In this light, some might even go as far as to argue that the disciplining of one's children or even education in general are inherently violent acts. Thus, surprisingly, though really not surprisingly, a relatively new development in some universities in the United States consists of informing students ahead of time that a controversial subject to be treated in the classroom could potentially exert violence upon their beliefs and sensibilities.

The latter, needless to say, appears extreme, political correctness oftentimes becoming a violent practice unto itself, a kind of violent act committed against oneself, if you will. However, no matter how one construes violence, most would concur that there is a significant chasm between the possible violence exerted upon students' values in the classroom and lynching in the United States, or, say, between micro aggression and blacks under Apartheid in South Africa. In fact, some might even argue that focusing on micro aggression while neglecting political and economic violence is a luxury that only few can afford. Furthermore, there seems to be a certain truthfulness, whether we like it or not, in Darwin's and Nietzsche's controversial contention that, of necessity, to exist demands exercising some degree of violence. This does not mean, naturally, that either form of violence must be accepted, or, especially, that there is an inevitability to the "exertion of physical force." Of the two types of violence, nonetheless, the psychological and the physical, the latter definitely gets more attention, even though, as most would agree, these two types of violence usually coexist. In the end, and paraphrasing the title of Joseph Campbell's classic study on mythology – but with a twist–, we could maintain that violence is an anti-hero with a thousand faces, an anti-hero who in the novels of Diamela Eltit, Lina Meruane and Fátima Sime shows his ugliest of faces. But before analyzing these novels, I would like to describe very briefly the cerebrations on the topic of violence by two critics, Walter Benjamin and Slavoj Žižek, respectively, as their views...