Representing Trauma Through Fiction: The Search for an Ideal Interlocutor in Rosencof’s El Bataraz

Much has been written in the past few decades about the political violence that marked the infamous dictatorships of the Southern Cone in the 1970s and 80s, as authors and critics wrestled with questions related to memory and exile along with the representation of what Dominick LaCapra calls “traumatic limit events.” These are defined by LaCapra as events where “an extreme threshold or limit is crossed, something ‘unique’ happens and the standard opposition between uniqueness and comparability is unsettled, thereby depriving comparatives (especially in terms of magnitude) of a common measure or foundation” (History and Memory 7). According to LaCapra such events present special obstacles for reconstruction (artistic or otherwise) because “they are highly ‘cathected’ or invested with affect and considerations of value” (Writing History 18–19), making it nearly impossible to write about them from an objective point of view.

Mauricio Rosencof’s novel El Bataraz can be seen as one author’s answer to the question of how to represent trauma, particularly when it is deeply personal. It is a fictional representation of Rosencof’s prison experience during the Uruguayan dictatorship, and it contains many fantastic elements while nonetheless reflecting a reality that Rosencof himself lived. While some question the use of fiction and fantasy to represent historical events, I will argue that in El Bataraz it is precisely through the use of a fictionalized voice and of imaginary interlocutors that the communication of the traumatic experience becomes possible. The creation of imaginary dialogues allows for the act of “working through” trauma to take place, an act that LaCapra defines as an “articulatory practice,” through which the survivor learns to “distinguish between past and present and to recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then while realizing that one is living here and now with openings to the future” (Writing History 22). Finally, the fantastic aspects of the text provide a way of representing the prison experience without overwhelming the reader’s capacity to imagine or to comprehend, demonstrating that fiction can and does indeed play an important role in memorializing the past as well as in representing trauma.

Mauricio Rosencof, born in 1933 in Florida, Uruguay, was the youngest son of Jewish parents who had emigrated from Poland just before the rise of Nazism. In the 1960s, when Rosencof was already a well-known playwright in Uruguay, he started to engage in political activities: he founded the Communist Youth and later became a member of the National Liberation Movement, also called the Tupamaros. The fact that he played a leadership role in this left-wing urban guerrilla group led to his arrest and torture in 1972 and, after the 1973 coup that established military rule, to his position as a political hostage.¹ Subsequently, Rosencof spent over twelve years imprisoned in solitary confinement under extremely inhumane conditions, in dungeons and military barracks spread all across the country. After his release in 1985, during Uruguay’s gradual transition to democracy, Rosencof published a number of narratives that deal with the prison experience, including Memorias del calabozo (1987/8),² El Bataraz (1991), Las cartas que no llegaron (2000) and Piedritas bajo la almohada (2002). In all of these texts the author faces the difficult question of how to represent the traumatic experiences that he himself endured as well as the horrors of the Uruguayan dictatorship in general, particularly how to do so in a way that would do justice not only to his own memory but to the memory of those who could no longer speak for themselves.

Rosencof’s approach to the problem of representation reveals itself, among other things, in the different genres that he chooses for his narratives, first following a strictly testimonial model in Memorias del calabozo and then moving towards fictional representations in his later publications. According to Anna Forné in her article “El desdoblamiento de identidades en El Bataraz de Mauricio Rosencof,” this transition reflects a need to move beyond the act of testifying, which is largely about transmitting knowledge of the truth, and toward a...