Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction: Palabra de Mujer

By Gustavo Carvajal

In what ways do the politics of memory perpetuate gendered images of those directly affected by political violence in Chile? Can the literary rewriting of painful experiences contest existing interpretations of national trauma and the portrayal of women in such discourses? How do women participate in the production of collective narratives of the past in the aftermath of violence? This book discusses the literary representation of women and their memory practices in the recent work of seven contemporary Chilean authors: Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Pía González, Fátima Sime, Arturo Fontaine, Pía Barros and Nona Fernández. It locates their works in the context of a patriarchal politics of memory and commemorative culture in Chile and as part of a wider body of contested interpretations of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90). Through the analysis of novels that depict the dictatorial past through the memories of women, it is argued that these texts understand and explore remembrance as a process by which the patriarchal co-option of women’s memories can be exposed and even contested in the aftermath of violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781786838056

Gustavo Carvajal

Gustavo is a Sr. Reservoir Engineer at BP America conducting automated workflows to evaluate unconventional assets and deploys data analytics for production optimization. He is developing full field reservoir simulation models for unconventional reservoirs using history matching in complex geologic systems containing rock matrix, hydraulic fractures, and natural fractures. Prior to his current position, he worked for Halliburton delivering Digital Oil Field intelligent strategies and operations. Gustavo has more than 20 years of experience with IOC, NOC and services companies, and he has published more than 60 technical papers on the subject of reservoir studies and DOF applications, developed more than 40 complex automated workflows that include classic reservoir and production engineering tools combined with artificial intelligence components, and has 15 patents for improving real-time model-based operations. He holds a BSc in Petroleum Engineering from the Universidad de Oriente (Venezuela), a MEng in Project Management from the U.C. Andres Bello (Venezuela), and an MSc and MPhil, both in Reservoir Engineering from Heriot-Watt University, Scotland, UK.

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IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction

Series Editors

Professor David George (Swansea University)

Professor Paul Garner (University of Leeds)

Editorial Board

Samuel Amago (University of Virginia)

Roger Bartra (Universidad Autónoma de México)

Paul Castro (University of Glasgow)

Richard Cleminson (University of Leeds)

Catherine Davies (University of London)

Luisa-Elena Delgado (University of Illinois)

Maria Delgado (Central School of Speech and Drama, London)

Will Fowler (University of St Andrews)

David Gies (University of Virginia)

Gareth Walters (Swansea University)

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

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Ophelia: Shakespeare and Gender in Contemporary Spain

Sharon Keefe Ugalde

Madness and Irrationality in Spanish and Latin American Literature and Culture

Lloyd Hughes Davies

Fantastic Short Stories by Women Authors from Spain and Latin America: A Critical Anthology

Patricia Gracía and Teresa López-Pellisa

Carmen Martín Gaite: Poetics, Visual Elements and Space

Ester Bautista Botello

The Spanish Anarchists of Northern Australia:

Revolution in the Sugar Cane Fields

Robert Mason

Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes: On Brazil and Global Cinema

Maite Conde and Stephanie Dennison

IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Women, Memory and Dictatorship in Recent Chilean Fiction

Palabra de Mujer

GUSTAVO CARVAJAL

© Gustavo Carvajal, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University of Wales Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-78683-803-2

e-ISBN 978-1-78683-805-6

The right of Gustavo Carvajal to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Contents

Series Editors’ Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Patriarchy and memory

Remembering dictatorial Chile

Women’s memories in the public sphere

Chilean fictions of the traumatic past

1Violence and Women’s Memories in El Desierto

Rituals of violence and memory

Understanding the traumatic past

Victims and perpetrators

2Militants, Wives and Mothers in Jamás el Fuego Nunca and Libreta de Familia

The Chilean novel, the dictatorship and the left

The gendered construction of militants and wives

The gendered construction of a mother

3Female Collaboration in Carne de Perra and La Vida Doble

The Bachelet government

Confessions and conversions

Collaborators in democracy

Telling stories

4Daughters Rewriting Legacies in ‘El lugar del otro’ and Fuenzalida

Inherited memories

Family albums

Daughters of the dictatorship

Rewriting legacies

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Series Editors’ Foreword

Over recent decades the traditional ‘languages and literatures’ model in Spanish departments in universities in the United Kingdom has been superseded by a contextual, interdisciplinary and ‘area studies’ approach to the study of the culture, history, society and politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds – categories that extend far beyond the confines of the Iberian Peninsula, not only in Latin America but also to Spanish-speaking and Lusophone Africa.

In response to these dynamic trends in research priorities and curriculum development, this series is designed to present both disciplinary and interdisciplinary research within the general field of Iberian and Latin American Studies, particularly studies that explore all aspects of Cultural Production (inter alia literature, film, music, dance, sport) in Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, Catalan, Galician and indigenous languages of Latin America. The series also aims to publish research in the History and Politics of the Hispanic and Lusophone worlds, at the level of both the region and the nation-state, as well as on Cultural Studies that explore the shifting terrains of gender, sexual, racial and postcolonial identities in those same regions.

For Alejandra and Rafael, with much love

Acknowledgements

This book started out as a doctoral dissertation written under the supervision of Professor Karl Posso and Dr James Scorer at the University of Manchester. I am extremely grateful to Professor Posso and Dr Scorer for their infinite patience, valuable insight and honest advice throughout those years. What I learned under their guidance has been invaluable to me. I also thank the team at the University of Wales Press, especially Sarah Lewis, for their input and opportune help during the writing of this book.

As a graduate student, I had the privilege of pursuing my studies with many encouraging fellow postgraduates, in particular Patrick O’Shea, Alejandra Isaza, Kristina Pla and Miquel Pomar. I am especially thankful to Ignacio Aguiló for his friendship and always appreciated advice.

While living in West Yorkshire, I found an incredible group of friends in the School of English and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds. I wish to thank Valentina Ragni, Angelica Pesarini, Silvia Bergamini, Vasiliki Nassiopoulou, Hui Ling Michelle Chiang, Adrian Knapp and Henghameh Saroukhani for their inspiration. I am particularly thankful to Arthur Rose for his friendship and support during my last months in Leeds and Manchester back in 2015. I also want to express my sincere gratitude to Nick Hutcheon. His help was invaluable during the preparation of this book. In Hull, I am eternally indebted to Ruth, Mark and Haroldo for their cheerful advice and kindness all those years away from home.

Of course, I would have achieved nothing without the love and support of my parents, María Angélica and Patricio. I am also especially indebted to my parents-in-law, Sofía and Eduardo, for their words of advice and help during the current Coronavirus disease pandemic.

Finally, I am deeply grateful for the support I have received from Alejandra and Rafael. Their love helped me to write this book. My research would not have been possible without them.

Introduction

This book investigates the literary representation of women and their memory practices in the work of seven contemporary Chilean authors: Diamela Eltit, Carlos Franz, Pía González, Fátima Sime, Arturo Fontaine, Pía Barros and Nona Fernández. It locates their works in the context of a patriarchal politics of memory and commemorative culture and as part of a wider body of contested interpretations of General Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–90). Through the analysis of novels that depict the past of women touched by political violence, it is argued that these texts understand remembrance as a process by which the (patriarchal) silencing, co-option or nationalisation of women’s memories can be exposed, denounced and even contested in the aftermath of violence. It challenges masculine control over memory politics in Chile to address the painful experiences of women and to examine how these experiences are portrayed in dominant interpretations of national trauma. To show this, I discuss how the texts use formal and thematic aspects to critique the deployment of standard socio-cultural conventions regarding women, as articulated in collective discourses of the past.

An example of the patriarchal control over memory politics is the report of the Chilean Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación (National Truth and Reconciliation Commission). In 1990, Christian Democrat president Patricio Aylwin appointed lawyer Raúl Rettig Chairman of the committee.¹ A year later, the Rettig Report was published. It provided a comprehensive account of human rights violations during Pinochet’s regime, identified thousands of victims and proposed reparatory measures for the future. Yet the majority of cases presented by the report referred to male victims of forced disappearance. For the commission, the main targets of human rights violations were typically men, a distortion that shaped the entire historiography of the period. In fact, women were portrayed almost exclusively as mothers or wives of the disappeared and as ‘spoils of war’, their names left out of the three-volume report. In the brief mention of women in the report, there is no further discussion of female-specific experiences (for instance, pregnancy, abortion or motherhood in captivity). These issues remained at the margins of male-oriented narratives of past atrocities. It is within this context the selected novels are read in this study. When the representation of women’s memories in the public sphere is analysed, it exposes the problems inherent in writing and propagating male-dominated accounts of national trauma. Certainly, women’s memories are included, but these inclusions generally serve, as in the Rettig Report, a patriarchal collective. However, by addressing the way in which women’s memories contribute to nationalised accounts of the past and revealing the extent to which their recollections differ from male-dominated memory discourses of dictatorial rule, these texts contest the politics of memory and the function of women’s memories in such discourses.

When addressing the politics of memory in Chile since the return to democracy in 1990, scholars have mainly focused on two areas of inquiry. First, they have considered the body of practices and policies designed to assess the legacy of past atrocities such as prosecutions, truth-seeking commissions, memorials and reparations. Second, a large amount of scholarly literature has been produced on transitional justice, tracing post-authoritarian interactions between the judiciary, the military and human rights organisations.² The analysis of these two areas during the first decade of democracy highlights the development of Chile’s negotiated transition to a new regime of power and the struggles regarding public discussions about the past.³ Scholars such as Alexander Wilde have also pointed out that a new ‘season of memory’ emerged in Chile from the late 1990s onwards.⁴ A crucial year in this new phase is 1998. It marked the resignation of General Augusto Pinochet as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the implementation of drastic modifications to the Chilean Constitution. But more importantly, it was also the year of Pinochet’s detention in London until his release by the British government in March 2001. All these events created the conditions for active discussions of the past in the public sphere. As Hite and other scholars remind us, since 2000 ‘Chile has witnessed an explosion of commemoration and memorial-making of various kinds. The predominant form is civil society-driven activity, involving often prolonged and fitful struggles among and between relatively small numbers of actors at both local and national levels’.⁵ Hite’s observation is important, since it is helpful to avoid a rigid definition of the politics of memory only as the result of political engineering designed by the elites in power (a top-down perspective).⁶ By turning to Chilean fiction published since 2005 onwards, this book challenges the assumption that the traumatic past can only be assessed and understood through the politics of memories articulated by a diversity of official and civil actors, political coalitions, grassroots movements and, in particular, testimonial and non-fictional writing published since the return to democracy.

There are also other reasons why it is important to focus on these particular works. From the 1990s onwards, Chile experienced a surge in testimonial, investigative and autobiographical writings, especially from the perspective of women. Crucial in this trajectory is the year 1993, with the publication of two testimonies by former collaborators with the military regime: Marcia Merino’s Mi Verdad and Luz Arce’s El Infierno. A year later, Carmen Castillo’s documentary film La Flaca Alejandra: Vidas y Muertes de una Mujer en Chile (1994) was released in France and Chile. It consisted of a five-day interview between Castillo and Marcia Merino about her story of betrayal and collaboration. Moreover, in the early 2000s Editorial Don Bosco published the series Testimonios, focusing on the life-stories of female public figures of the military regime, opposition and the transitional governments: Pinochet’s former Minister of Justice Mónica Madariaga (La Verdad y la Honestidad se Pagan Caro, 2002), former Secretary-General and President of the Chilean Communist Party Gladys Marín (La Vida es Hoy, 2002) and former President of Chile’s Consejo de Defensa del Estado (State Defence Council) Clara Szczaranski (El Bisel del Espejo: Mi Ventana, 2002). In 2007, Carmen Castillo’s new film Calle Santa Fe explored the haunting recollections of her participation in Chile’s failed socialist revolution and her traumatic memories of political persecution. More recently, in 2012, the testimony of Nubia Becker Una Mujer en Villa Grimaldi (originally published in Uruguay in 1976 under the pen-name Carmen Rojas and entitled Recuerdos de una Mirista) has re-addressed traumatic memories from the perspective of a victim of human rights violations. The actors involved and the issues touched on in these non-fictional works are also evident in the novels of each writer that are discussed in the following chapters.

This book finally investigates how these writers explore the forms and contents of fictional writing, while connecting their readers to moments and issues of historical importance. For example, Carlos Franz’s El Desierto (2005) uses a victim of human rights violations to focalise the consequences of dictatorial rule, the transition to democracy and a consensual approach to the past. Diamela Eltit’s (Jamás el Fuego Nunca, 2007) and Pía González’s (Libreta de Familia, 2008) novels explore the politics of memory of the Chilean left from the perspectives of, respectively, a former guerrilla combatant and a social activist in the anti-Pinochet movements. Fátima Sime’s Carne de Perra (2009) and Arturo Fontaine’s La Vida Doble (2010) engage with the particular positions of two female collaborators living in democratic Chile (Carne de Perra) and in exile (La Vida Doble). Pía Barros’s short story ‘El lugar del otro’ (2010) and Nona Fernández’s Fuenzalida (2012) explore the burden of the inherited past on those untouched by dictatorial violence and their critical responses to the intergenerational transference of traumatic memory narratives. Moreover, despite the fact that each novelist remained in Chile during dictatorial rule, these writers find a position freed from the burden of victimhood from which to interrogate the production of patriarchal memory narratives, which they receive together with the rest of Chilean society.

Patriarchy and memory

This study follows Sylvia Walby’s definition of the term patriarchy.⁷ Walby discriminates between the theory and practice of patriarchy. At a theoretical level, Walby defines patriarchy as a system of social relations in which men oppress women. The key words of this definition are ‘social relations’, since it shows the concept’s rejection of the idea that patriarchy is mainly based on biological determinism or the assumption that every man is in a dominant position and every woman subordinate in any and all contexts.⁸ Patriarchy, as can be inferred from Walby’s definition, is a system of social relations that endures across time and place, due to its ability to adapt to new circumstances. Transformations in the system of social relations inevitably affect the gender imbalances that patriarchy perpetuates. In other words, when using the term ‘patriarchy’, it is important to understand the changing articulations of the concept throughout time and in different contexts. Patriarchy is not monolithic and, therefore, there is not only one form of patriarchy, just as there is never simply one way of being a person.

Walby also investigates the praxis of patriarchy and identifies six structures of social relations that produce it in different contexts: paid employment, household production, culture, sexuality, violence and state. As the work of Julieta Kirkwood in Chile exposed, all of these structures were in practice before, during and after the military regime.⁹ Certainly, there has been a material lessening in the intensity of these structures since the return to democracy, such as reductions in the wages gap, reproductive rights or gender quotas in the public sector. But patriarchy continues to operate in different forms. This book argues that the discussion about the past in Chile is an example of how patriarchy responds to its decrease in certain social structures: it adopts other forms to continue subordinating women in the public sphere. Indeed, as Walby demonstrates, the discussion of women’s exclusion and subordination in the private and public spheres is crucial to understanding the existence of patriarchal structures in operation in democratic societies, despite economic, cultural or political advances. Reductions in patriarchal intensity have occurred primarily in the private sphere. The work of second-wave feminism has challenged and even reduced the exclusion of women as the main strategy of patriarchal relations in the household from a historical point of view. However, when exploring the operations of patriarchy in the public sphere, it is possible to detect how the exclusion of women has shifted into their subordination within this locus. In other words, advances and historical changes in the intensity of patriarchy at a private level precipitate its reformulation in the public sphere, rather than its abolition. Certainly, this describes the case of women’s movements in Chile before, during and after the dictatorship: from certain advances during Salvador Allende’s administration regarding the situation of Chilean women,¹⁰ to the intensification of patriarchy (and gender inequality) during Pinochet’s regime,¹¹ to the male-controlled consensual approach to issues of gender of the transitional governments.¹² Patriarchy, then, is a changing arrangement of relations that oppresses women with different intensities at a private and public level. This study considers collective male-controlled memory cultures of different groups as examples of Walby’s social structures operating in the public sphere in a Chilean context. Throughout this book, it will be argued that these memory cultures produced gendered narratives of the traumatic past that were inherently oppressive for women. The social dimension of memory explored by Maurice Halbwachs is therefore crucial for supporting this claim about collective memory cultures and patriarchy.

Halbwachs’s work explores memory discourses in relation to social dynamics. He departs from previous positions emanating from neurological and psychological perspectives that attempted to define how and why individuals remember. He suggests memory is not only an individual phenomenon, but a social one. As he states in The Collective Memory, individuals cannot remember in complete autonomy from the world: ‘We are never alone. Other men need not be physically present, since we always carry with us and in us a number of distinct persons’.¹³ For Halbwachs, previous studies did not pay enough attention to the fact that individuals are inevitably enclosed in one or more social groups. Acknowledging this, Halbwachs argues, changes our understanding of memory and its outcomes. This is due to the fact that the group provides individuals with ‘frameworks’ that shape the way they remember. In On Collective Memory he states: ‘No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections’.¹⁴ Halbwachs focuses on some of them: family, religion and social class.¹⁵ This book considers patriarchy, in the sense previously defined, to be equivalent to one of Halbwachs’s ‘frameworks’, since it operates in any given society. For Halbwachs, there is diversity in the degree to which people remember communally, but it is still a phenomenon rooted in social relations. As he states:

While the collective memory endures and draws strength from its base in a coherent body of people, it is individuals as group members who remember. While these remembrances are mutually supportive of each other and common to all, individual members still vary in the intensity with which they experience them. I would readily acknowledge that each memory is a viewpoint on the collective memory, that this viewpoint changes as my position changes, that this position itself changes as my relationships to other milieus change. Therefore, it is not surprising that everyone does not draw on the same part of this common instrument. In accounting for that diversity, however, it is always necessary to revert to a combination of influences that are social in nature.¹⁶

Certainly, individuals understand, experience and reconstruct these collective memories with different intensities in the present. However, these memories are powerful enough, which in Halbwachs’s approach means they are sufficiently general and impersonal, to perpetuate their meaning beyond the constant transformation of the group, the disappearance or replacement of its members and changes in political or social contexts. This explains the persistence of memories of experiences whose interest concerns a great number of members of the community, for instance, the military coup and dictatorship in Chile. Group memories of these events survive and are socially reconstructed in the present, despite the fact that the people involved in the political upheaval before, during and after the military regime have started to pass away. This is important for the examination of the selected Chilean novels, since they touch on three collective interpretations of the past: the coup as the ‘salvation’ of the country; guerrilla struggle as a ‘heroic’ sacrifice; and the reconciliation of the ‘national family’ in democratic Chile. From this, it will be argued that existing collective memories of the traumatic past represent diverse groups and contexts, yet these groups produce their interpretations of the past within patriarchal frameworks that shape female identities in the present.

Therefore, memory must be understood as a human construction (individual and collective), a result of a series of practices, tropes and conventions operating in the present that produces a narrative of the past for its promotion and dissemination. In other words, this book understands memory as the process of creating a discourse of the past that is always strategic, due to social structures of control and organisation, in terms of what is remembered, included or told and what is forgotten, omitted or silenced. Certainly, memory is an individual, social and cultural phenomenon that facilitates our understanding and experience of the past in the present. Yet, the emphasis of this study is on the influence and consequences of patriarchal social structures operating at the level of memory culture, shaping the production of group memories in contemporary Chile and their representation of women’s experiences and identities in them. This perspective allows one to assess and to re-read the fictionalisations of the traumatic past in the selected novels as writing against the gendered representation of women in existing interpretations of national trauma. They do so by imagining less standardised images and accounts of women directly touched by violence. Indeed, these are fictions that articulate the symbolic characterisations of feminine individuals in an attempt to contest the structures of social domination that have shaped collective explanations of the past and the role of women in them.

Remembering dictatorial Chile

When discussing memory in Chile, there are four distinct interpretations regarding dictatorial rule: the coup as the salvation of the country; the dictatorship as the brutal rupture with Chile’s republican tradition; military rule as a time of political persecution and awakening; and the recent past as a ‘closed box’, that is, the silence about past atrocities for the protection of Chile’s recovered, yet fragile democracy.¹⁷ The first two of these interpretations immediately emerged as a result of General Pinochet’s coup d’état on 11 September 1973. In the first interpretation, the military overthrow of Allende’s democratically elected government is remembered as a rescue mission. Heroism is its defining quality, since the actions led by the Armed Forces saved the nation from