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Abstract
This article considers the legacy of 1970s revolutionary thought and political action within Argentine cultural production. Liliana Heker’s 1996 novel El fin de la historia is a fictional depiction of Montonera ‘Lucy’ Carazo, who was taken as a political prisoner, fell in love with and seduced her captor, and went on to collaborate with the military regime. Similar stories continue to arise and generate a great deal of debate in present-day Argentina, at the same time that Heker's novel itself continues to elicit controversial critical and cultural responses. This close reading of the novel thus situates itself within present-day debates regarding the ethics and politics of 1970s armed struggle as well as ongoing debates concerning individuals who abjure or betray their commitment to 1970s revolutionary causes. The analysis focuses on seduction and sexuality as a means of leading the novel’s protagonist astray from the cultural topoi of revolutionary martyrdom and heroism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
* While the novel’s title is deliberately polysemic, referring both to the end of history and to the end of the story (the novel), the author is most likely referring to the end of history in the Fukuyama sense of the definitive and universal triumph of Western liberal democracy. Heker maintains in her article 1999 ‘Contra el poder’: ‘After all also the expiration of utopias, and the death of ideologies, and the end of history are nothing more than tactics woven and imposed by Power’ (25). This and all subsequent translations are mine.
1. For over half a century, Liliana Heker has played a prominent and controversial role in the Argentine literary sphere, publishing fiction and serving as editor of the literary journals El Ornitorrinco, El Grillo de Papel, and El Escarabajo de Oro, popular among 1960s and 1970s militant circles. During this same time period, Heker infamously engaged in her so-called ‘Polémica con Cortázar,’ a series of journal articles in which the young writer took the great novelist to task for his position that the only truly politically committed individuals were those who exiled themselves during the dictatorship. Heker later won the 1986–1987 Buenos Aires Premio Municipal de Novela for her first novel, Zona de clivaje.
2. In the narrator’s final interview of her protagonist, Leonora maintains that her captor/soon-to-be lover did not kill her husband. In contrast, fellow former political prisoner Graciela Daleo maintains that Mercedes Carazo, Heker’s real-life friend upon whom Leonora Ordaz is based, confessed to her that she did know that her captor, Antonio Pernías, was the one who shot her husband, Marcelo Kurlat (di Tella).
3. My interview of Martín Kohan, 25 June 2012. Buenos Aires, Argentina.
4. In his 2003 inaugural address, Néstor Kirchner proclaimed, ‘Formo parte de una generación diezmada, castigada con dolorosas ausencias; me sumé a las luchas políticas, creyendo en valores y convicciones que no pienso dejar en la puerta de la Casa Rosada.’ The full text of the speech is reproduced online: http://constitucionweb.blogspot.com/2010/02/discurso-de-asuncion-de-presidente.html.
5. An earlier, similar debate was sparked by Oscar del Barco’s 2006 publication of his letter ‘No matarás’ in La Intemperie. Leis himself responded to del Barco’s letter in a column entitled ‘Los límites de la política’ in ex-Montonero Sergio Bufano’s periodical Lucha Armada, affirming many of the same central arguments that would later appear in Testamento de los años ’70. The English translation of del Barco’s letter was published in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 16.2.
6. See Reato’s ‘Verbitsky: Los usos de Gelman y la autocrítica que no fue’ and Verbitsky’s ‘El universo desnudo.’
7. Karen Saban’s Citation2013 Imaginar el pasado shows that much of the negative criticism the novel has received is based on this misinterpretation of the novel’s narrative complexities. Saban directly names Ana Longoni as having misinterpreted the novel this way in her seminal analysis of stories of survivors, Traiciones.
8. Some would liken Heker’s novel to Marco Bechis’s 1999 film Garage Olimpo since both depict a relationship between a female political prisoner and a male dictatorial agent. I would argue that the works differ drastically insofar as Garage Olimpo depicts a naive young woman with few political ties, whereas Leonora is a very calculating, high-ranking Montonera.
9. In this essay, Dolar expands on Louis Althusser’s well-known understanding of interpellation to incorporate Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theories so as to examine the subjective processes of interpellation, hence the special attention paid to the experience of falling in love vis-à-vis ideology and interpellation.
10. Given its inherent disregard for existing social structures, it comes as little surprise that Baudrillard’s theory of seduction has been met with vehement criticism by feminist scholars (see Jane Gallop, ‘French Theory and the Seduction of Feminism,’ in Men and Feminism. Ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. New York: Methuen, 1987).
11. Taking as a point of departure Gramsci’s notions of hegemony and domination in her book The Sex Lives of Saints, literary critic Virginia Burrus notes that both hegemony and seduction ‘evoke the complex collusion of (vulnerable) force and (resistant) compliance’ (2004: 131).
12. Morello-Frosch: ‘la víctima retiene ciertos mínimos poderes que le permiten avalar al enemigo para crearse un espacio de indispensabilidad’ (1999: 309).
13. Of course, the gendered body is also central to memories of torture, including El fin de la historia, but that is not my focus here.
14. Valeria Manzano and Barbara Sutton both leave the phrase ‘poner el cuerpo’ in the original Spanish in their English-language studies. As Sutton points out, ‘the notion of poner el cuerpo has some overlaps with “to put the body on the line” and to “give the body,” but […] transcends both notions’ (2010: 161).
15. Posse’s novel reflects – from the perspective of Lobo, a fictionalization of Tigre Acosta – that if Greta were not so attractive, she likely would have died earlier, and that the beautiful prisoners are the ones surviving. For her part, Luz Arce speculates – after being shown on news reports in the 1990s entering and leaving hearings for the Rettig Commission – that if she had been less attractive the public may have judged her less harshly for her actions of collaborating with the regime.
16. On the other hand, it must be noted that Montoneros set out (and at least attempted to enforce) strict sanctions on fidelity and caution in amorous relationships as a means of ensuring the integrity of its members and that no one was compromised.
17. For Isabella Cosse, Casullo’s words show that ‘there was a new social mandate to engage in sex as much as possible, which for women often entailed social coercion’ (Citation2014: 438). Women’s sacrificing or compromising their bodies, in this sense, was a component of being a Montonera.
18. ‘Why renounce sweet love when we knew we could be dead soon?’ Rolo Diez, El mejor y el peor (2010: 46).
19. This sentence is almost identical to what Heker reported to Página/12 that Mercedes ‘Lucy’ Carazo said to her in an interview: ‘It is not true that he seduced me. Nobody seduces me, I am the one who seduces.’ (par. 4) Adriana Meyer. ‘La polémica historia de Mercedes ‘Lucy’ Carazo.’ Página/12 16 November 1998.
20. For a more recent analysis of privacy and intimacy within detention centers, see Jelin 2012.
21. Particularly ambivalent is the chapter’s account of Norma ‘Gaby’ Arrostito; upon her death, di Tella reports, her captor and suitor ‘Delfín’ (‘Dolphin’) Chamorro reportedly asked newly arrived detainees if they were acquaintances of hers and, when they nodded yes, asked, ‘why don’t you tell me stories about her?’ (1999: 100).
22. Norman Cheadle’s unpublished conference paper ‘Metahistoria y crítica ideológica en El fin de la historia de Liliana Heker,’ delivered at the May 1998 Congress of the Social Sciences and the Humanities at the University of Ottawa, Canada.
23. Literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick affirms in Seduction and Betrayal regarding nineteenth-century female protagonists: ‘when the heroine’s history turns about a sexual betrayal, it matters whether she is the central figure in the plot or a somewhat less powerfully and less fully considered “victim” on the periphery [….] The inner life of the woman matters, what she feels and has felt, the degree of her understanding of the brutal cycles of life’ (1974: 182).
24. Arce’s assertion here is tied to her condition of anorgasmia resultant of sexual trauma in her childhood. While Leonora Ordaz does not share this condition, Arce’s assertion here of her resolve to exercise discretion over when to give her body to someone is relevant. Another key difference between Arce and Leonora is that Arce maintains that she was trying to find a way out of her relationship with the DINA member who oversaw her while she was allowed to live in a home outside the concentration camp.
25. It should be noted that another prisoner in the ESMA stated that Pernías, Carazo’s captor/lover, made attempts to seduce her, but that he was responsive to her refusals and did not try to force her (see Lewin and Wornat 2014).
26. See Lewin and Wornat 2014.
27. ‘Attention, passersby, who see the thirty-something man and young lady passing by as if it were a big deal. Turn your head, cover your eyes, blush, be scandalized, envy them. What is beginning now is a love story’ (81). Héctor Mario Cavallari has posited that all of Heker’s novelistic production challenges existing cultural and social expectations (2012: 30). Cavallari’s many interventions on Heker have focused upon questions of female authorship rather than her engagement with history and politics.
28. The term ‘subversion’ was used by the military to refer to any activities that ran counter to the regime’s doctrine and particularly referenced revolutionary groups such as Montoneros. Before the military takeover in 1976, the government already sought to eliminate ‘subversion’ through the creation of the paramilitary organization the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina (AAA) in 1973.
29. The fishbowl – ‘la pecera’ in Spanish – is described in the novel as a place of ‘high-ranking prisoners with a collaborative spirit’ (113).
30. Tactics of violence are figured as having seductive power in the 2014 documentary El diálogo in Héctor Leis’s assertion, ‘we were all seduced by violence.’ Leis is particularly relevant to Leonora’s character because Leis was also a high-ranking official within the group.
31. The novel explains – from Diana’s perspective – that Leonora’s mother had commented to Diana’s mother that she wished for a nice Jewish husband (like Diana’s father) for Leonora; when her daughter marries Fernando, she at first thinks that he will make a nice Jewish husband, but later changes her mind due to the upheaval and danger brought upon Leonora and Violeta as a result of his (and Leonora’s) political activities. She thus seems relieved that her daughter has found a seemingly less volatile partner and attends her granddaughter’s baptism.
32. This ‘remainder’ might also be understood as ‘residual.’ Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature, defines residual culture: ‘formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present’ (1978: 122). Idelber Avelar posits that the residue of mourning is allegorized in postdictatorial fiction, so that the residual literary representation is allegorical. I would argue, however, that Heker’s novel – in its move away from a so-called ‘allegory of defeat’ (Diana’s diegetic novel) – would correspond to the ironic, in keeping with Hayden White’s Metahistory, wherein the ironic mode marks the disappearance of the heroic, drawing on Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism’s position that ‘irony is the non-heroic residue of tragedy’ (1973: 231, my italics).
33. Kirchner critic, novelist, and former Montonero Martín Caparrós has signaled that, out of all that the Kirchners have appropriated from 1970s political practice, more than anything else, they have assimilated ‘the idea of violence’ (2011: 98).
34. The speech is reproduced here: http://www.redaccionpopular.com/articulo/discurso-de-la-presidenta-de-la-nacion-cristina-fernandez-de-kirchner-el-25-de-mayo-2013.