Allegorical Specters and the Rhetorics of Mourning in Diamela Eltit's Jamás el fuego nunca

Abstract

It has been four decades since the military coup d'état in Chile; however, legal and criminal questions regarding the disappeared bodies of Pinochet's regime are still unanswered, not only because the perpetrators remain unpunished, hence, the question of the viability of justice and the proper closure of national trauma are still in suspense, but also because the conditions of death and disappearance are not clear. The search for the disappeared body has turned towards forensic anthropology in order to assist with the identification of remains and the causes of death. In this article, I study Diamela Eltit's novel Jamás el fuego nunca (2008) and argue that her work questions the place of unidentifiable and unlocalizable remains have within the rhetorics of mourning in a post-dictatorial context. I argue, furthermore, that by recurring to the figure of the specter as an allegory of the forcefully disappeared, Eltit is creating a spectral ontology of the remains in order to interpellate the world of the living with regard to the repressed past.

Notes

¹ In an interview with Ana María Foxley for the Chilean newspaper La época, Diamela Eltit explains, ‘I am interested in all that goes against the grain of power, that is, otherness’ (1998, 4). Otherness, for Eltit, signifies an excess and overflow against institutional power, a zone of resistance and opposition. However, the search for the political place of the other—marginal communities, women, indigenous cultures, sexual minorities, the mentally ill—is a common thread among the new artistic and poetic voices that emerge in the 70s such as Carlos Leppe, Catalina Parra, Lotty Rosenfeld, Raúl Zurita, and Eltit herself and that will continue in the 80s through the performances of Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas. The search for this otherness will bring about a whole linguistic and literary revolution whereby the body marked by otherness becomes fundamental not only as a literary and political figure but as the textual space where the public and the private, power and institution, encounter each other. For an excellent reading on the place of the body in Chilean art since 1973, please refer to Nelly Richard's Márgenes e Instituciones (77–87).

² We can see the same gesture to diagnose Chilean historical malaises in Eltit's Impuesto a la carne in which two anonymous characters, this time a mother and a daughter, unveil a whole system of historical and political exclusions.

³ See Nelly Richard's Residuos y metáforas, Márgenes e instituciones and Políticas y estéticas de la memoria and Brazilian critic and theoretician Idelber Avelar's Alegorías de la derrota.

⁴ In regard to the place of the spectral in Latin American post-dictatorial studies, Estela Schindel has an excellent article entitled ‘Ghosts and Compañeros: Haunting Stories and the Quest for Justice around Argentina’s Former Terror Sites.'

⁵ For instance, works such as María Luisa Bombal's La última niebla, Juan Rulfo's ‘No oyes ladrar los perros’ and Pedro Páramo, and García Márquez's ‘Espantos de Agosto’ and ‘El último viaje del buque fantasma’ are, by now, part of the literary canon.

⁶ Eltit writes her JFN thirty-four years after Pinochet's coup d'état, thus signaling that the question of our debt to the past cannot be put to rest. The figure of the spectral, in this regard, is emblematic of such a refusal.

⁷ To say that Diamela Eltit is a diagnostician, interested in healing historical diseases, implies that she is, first and foremost, interested in life and so she explains in an interview with Mario Rodríguez (Diario el Día, 49).

⁸ The clandestine centers of torture and detention have now become public. The site Memoriaviva gives a thorough account of all the torture centers across the 13 regions. Most of the information regarding what happened in these places comes from the Informe Rettig and the Informe Valech (http://www.memoriaviva.com/Centros/centros_de_detencion.htm).

⁹ The unforgettable understood as the ‘shapeless chaos of the forgotten’ cannot, hence, become a politics since shapelessness is its paradigmatic modality for remaining at work ‘within us.’ A politics of the unforgettable will require a set of negotiations, a system of visibility, a set of laws, institutions, and agreements which defeat the purpose of the spectral to constitute a political refusal to Chilean triumphalist narratives of democratic development, both at a national and at an international level. The spectral qua political excess, on the other hand, does aim to configure a sociality of the specters, that is, a way of living with ghosts. For this reason, the spectral remains an ethical vocation. The spectral cannot be symbolized and that is why it remains unforgettable. Once the spectrality becomes known, memorable, and commemorative, it enters the realm of memory and it is thus subject to technologies, politics, and aesthetics.

¹⁰ As Jelica Šumič explains, Agamben is concerned with redeeming the past, specifically with saving ‘what was not’ (2011, 139). The ‘what was not’ is linked to the idea of the irreparability of the world. If ‘the Irreparable is that things are just as they are,’ it is only logical that redemption starts by recognizing this irreparability (Agamben qtd. in Šumič 139). Eltit's specters are, conversely, a defiance of this irreparability. The specter implies that the dead are not dead, that the impossible is possible. Hence, Eltit's ontology will presuppose a redemption in the time of the future anterior, of saving that which will have been, thus freeing the past from its irreparability and opening it up to the future. In The Time that Remains, Agamben takes a statement from Leibniz's ‘Primary Truths,’ ‘every possibility demands to exist, to become real,’ and inverts it: ‘Each existent demands its proper possibility, it demands that it become possible. Exigency consists in a relation between what is or has been, and its possibility’ (39). Eltit's specters are more radical: every impossibility as such demands to become possible. Exigency consists of a relation between what will have been and its possibility.

¹¹ Any becoming visible, Husserl tells us, already suggests an interpretative act (2001, 397–99).

¹² This, of course, introduces another issue: that of reality. Barthes saw himself as a realist hence the photograph for him is ‘an emanation of a past reality’; it tells us ‘what has been’ (88, 85). The principle operating behind this realism is that of certainty. The specter, as the ‘impossible as such,’ conversely is not an emanation of a past reality but an emanation of an impossibility.

¹³ This is why Derrida uses the term revenant to speak of the specter.

¹⁴ If we conceive, for instance, the possibility of the male character being alive, old, and sick, tormented by the killings of his ex-lover and son, the specter would be the man's hallucinatory condition proper to post-traumatic disorders. For Cathy Caruth, ‘to be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or an event’ (1995, 3–4). The man would be possessed here by the specters of his killings.

¹⁵ Of course, this ‘subversive repetition,’ to borrow Butler's terminology, the playful and performative inhabitation of culturally gendered positions in order to contest them, belongs to a long feminist critical tradition that goes from Luce Irigaray's and Naomi Schor's concept of mimicry to Judith Butler's parody of gender. Eltit seems to follow Irigaray's dictum for whom ‘[o]ne must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation, and thus to begin to thwart it …. To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to submit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the “perceptible,” of “matter”—to “ideas,” in particular to ideas about herself that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible …. It also means “to unveil” the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed into this function. They also remain elsewhere’ (1985, 76). To this I refer in section one with the ways in which the relationship between the main characters both reenact and contest gendered familial structures.

¹⁶ Another question would be: Is the specter's narration a lament, a confession? The woman seems to have betrayed her comrades while imprisoned and tortured. After that, the man and the rest of the cell, too, were captured. Eltit may be referring here to the infamous biographies/testimonies Mi infierno by Luz Arce, who after being tortured finally collaborated with the military and later became an officer, and Mi verdad: más allá del horror, yo acuso by Alejanda Merino Vega, a friend of Arce.

¹⁷ And here recovery must not be understood as a reconstitution or as restitution but, as Heidegger will have it ‘to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself’ (Heidegger quoted in Dreyfus, Hubert 1990).

¹⁸ In this regard, the specter is not entirely devoid of corporeality, that is, the apparitional requires a certain degree of embodiment or resemblance with the bodily. In consequence, the spectral has with the bodily a phenomenological and a temporal relationship. The specter is the afterwards of the bodily and, as such, it affirms the bodily as the presentation of the past. It affirms its endurance. What mediates between the bodily and the spectral is time. It is the phenomenal appearance of the spectral, the haunting, that bridges the temporal gap between the corporeal and the spectral. Thusly, there is no tension between the corporeal and the spectral; the former, insofar as absence, is the cause of the latter, insofar as presence.

¹⁹ See, for instance, Javier Edwards' ‘Obituario para una esperanza muerta’ which argues that JFN ‘is the story of a failed leftist revolutionary project’ and ‘the chronicle of a passion, of a fire that was doomed to fail, that in the moment of its biggest vital expression carried death as a deceiving but inevitable flag’ (http://www.letras.s5.com/de1,607,071.htm).

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Carolina Díaz

Carolina Díaz received her PhD in Spanish and Women's Studies from Rutgers University. She will be at Duke University in 2014 as a postdoctoral associate. Her research interests are Latin American art and literature, Chilean culture, feminist theories, continental philosophy, and psychoanalysis.