Notes
u 177 Notes Introduction . See the works of Lucia Guerra Cunningham, Sara Castro-Klarén, and María Teresa Medeiros-Lichem. 2. One of the most compelling examinations of recent cultural efforts to confront past traumatic histories in Latin America can be found in Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Here Taylor argues that the embodied performance, with its live enactment of scenarios, surpasses both text and narrative by “plac[ing] spectators within its frame, implicating us in its ethics and politics” (33). Despite the distinction that Taylor seeks to draw, the novels I examine here participate, albeit textually and narratively, to the same critical efforts that she traces in her book. As I discuss in this book, the authors themselves address the limitations of the written word by representing the process of extricating trauma as one that centers on listening to and engaging with embodied language. 3. In some instances, such as in Luisa Valenzuela’s La travesía or Laura Restrepo’s Dulce compañía, there are more obvious overlaps between the lived experience of the author and the imagined life experiences of the fictional protagonist. 4. Freud termed this mental resistance a “compulsion to repeat.” A particularly complex mental resistance, the “compulsion to repeat” describes a condition in which the subject’s unconscious “shuts off” the recollection of traumatic “impressions, scenes, or experiences” (2: 48). Rather than remember the trauma, the subject replaces the memory with other materials and then acts out what has been forgotten, reproducing the past “not as a memory but as an action.” The subject then repeats this action “without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it” (2: 50). Freud’s understanding of the stabilizing effect of the repetition compulsion has helped us to understand how at the interior the subject develops a personality, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs that sustain a sense of false stability. 5. In his Pasado y presente, Vezetti is referring to Argentina’s historical identity and to the reconstruction of this identity through memories of the most recent dictatorship (976–983). Vezetti points to preliminary efforts to remember in the years immediately following the dictatorship such as the monumental Nunca más, which worked to fix testimonial accounts and reconstructions of fahey.indd 177 8/10/07 10:13:55 AM the past, albeit in an effort to reestablish a state of lawful order. These texts hoisted the entire weight of the dictatorship on la Junta, thereby pardoning society at large and its institutions (the Church, labor unions, newspapers, etc.) of their responsibilities. Similarly, more recent attempts to recapture the heroism of predictatorship revolutionary activity draw nostalgically and uncritically on the transparency of the testimonial form to capture the injured and nostalgic voice of the militante revolucionario. These representations also fix the past by failing to critique it: “[S]pontaneous memories look to diminish any rupture with the past that might threaten the integrity of the self image: the defensive function of nostalgia centers on placing the focus of the memory in a way that confirms or exalts its own representation or value” (Pasado y presente 226). Both of these cases represent for Vezetti the manner in which recordar para no repetir inversely constitutes a partial forgetting, a kind of “compulsion to repeat” that signals the reemergence of the past in the present form as “an absence, a substitute, or a symptom” (6). 6. It would be a gross distortion to apply a rigorous psychoanalytical reading to the novels in question. In fact, several of the novels loosen Freud’s strict framework of “working through” from its psychoanalytic constraints. First and foremost , the writing subject claims independence from the analyst, discarding the hierarchical relationship between the analysand and analyst, but also between science and self-knowledge, the body and the mind. 7. In all of the novels, subjectification is revealed as a process in which social discourses become internalized. In Sefchovich’s Demasiado amor the protagonist internalizes the rhetoric of romance and passively gives in to her lover’s will. In El penúltimo viaje the protagonist Amapola deeply internalizes the repressive rule of her family life and of the totalitarian regime in which her family lives. These rhetorical and disciplinary forces are shown to enter into the interior of the person, affecting her internal relationship to herself and defining the way she relates to others. Exterior social forces interact in complex and assorted...
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