Women and Power in Argentine Literature: Stories, Interviews, and Critical Essays

7. Liliana Heer

Liliana Heer is a petite woman, yet she walks tall and carries herself with poise and self-assurance. Her eyes are inquisitive, and her hair hangs straight, as was fashionable in the 1960s. Liliana’s most striking feature is her intense gaze. When she looks at you, she looks beyond you—into the depths of your very soul. Liliana Heer THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK Liliana Heer | The Author and Her Work Liliana Heer was born in 1941 in the town of Esperanza, in the province of Santa Fe, a small rural town founded by Swiss settlers. They were lured to Argentina with promises of riches and success in hopes that they would found a colony in which they would serve as role models to the locals. Heer says that as a child she often thought the townspeople were exaggerated in their behavior , which was disciplined and virtuous almost to a fault. Her mother, Dina Ofelia Rivero Hüber, was a concert pianist. Her father, Alfredo Eduardo Heer Kie¬er, was an epidemiologist with a degree in legal medicine. He worked with the Public Health Department and was a member of the Organización Mundial de la Salud (World Health Organization). Though Heer prefers not to comment much about her personal history as a child, she does recall evenings at the family dinner table when all were engaged in fascinating conversations about culture and language. For Heer, family, culture, books, and encyclopedias were highly valued and a part of her everyday life. Heer received a public-school education at the Escuela Normal Mixta Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (Domingo Faustino Sarmiento Co-Ed School) from elementary through high school, where she specialized in teacher education . She recounts that her talent as a writer began to develop as a young girl, when her friends and classmates would ask her to write love letters for them. Heer remembers this experience with fondness and likens herself to a sort of modern Cyrano de Bergerac, facilitating love relationships. She feels that as a result of this activity, she became curious about the human mind and the workings of psychology. Another event that influenced her desire to write was a trip she took to Paris, where she felt much at home. Upon returning to Argentina, she turned to writing as a way to connect with Paris and relive the experience. In 1962, Heer received a degree in psychology from the Universidad del Litoral (Littoral University) in Rosario, the capital of Santa Fe. She practiced as a clinical psychologist at the Psychiatric Hospital of Rosario, the Carrasco Hospital (a hospital for patients with infectious diseases), and at the Buen Pastor Reformatory School for Women. From 1963 to 1964 she received a scholarship to pursue studies in the field of methodology of scientific investigation and undertook a research project on the topic of prejudice and the discourse of discrimination. In 1965, Heer moved to the Argentine capital city of Buenos Aires, where she still resides, to further her studies at the Escuela de Psicoterápia para liliana heer 163 Graduados (Graduate School of Psychotherapy). That was a three-year career under the direction of the Asociación Argentina de Psicoanálisis (Argentine Association of Psychoanalysis), an organization that was dedicated to narrowing the gap between medical doctors and psychoanalysts. During this stage of her life, she fell in love and had three children. She also wrote her first short story, “En concepción sublime” (Sublime Conception), which was published in 1980 in her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dejarse llevar (Carried Away). Heer claims that since then, she has been writing about the dark side of humanity. Her themes portray a world of violence, dominance, cruelty, and vulnerability. She attributes her interest in such themes, among other reasons , to her practice in psychology and psychoanalysis during the years of the fierce military dictatorship in Argentina, when many of her patients had been victimized. Heer’s first novel, Bloyd (1984), received the Boris Vian Award for Literature . This award was created during the dictatorship as a means of acknowledging writers who were ignored or denied recognition by the statesanctioned organizations. Bloyd takes place in a bordello and develops a discourse that explores the erotic and makes intertextual references to other masters of the erotic. Heer’s second novel, La tercera mitad (The Third Half), was published in 1988. She describes this work as...