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Hispania, Volume 97, Number 4, December 2014, pp. 612-622 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/hpn.2014.0126

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hpn/summary/v097/97.4.friedman.html

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Tales from the Crypt:

The Reemergence of
Chiles Political Memory
Mary Lusky Friedman
Wake Forest University
Abstract: Chilean novelists born during the 1970s who experienced as children the dictatorship of Augusto
Pinochet are reappraising how the dictatorship may have harmed its second-generation survivors. Initially
most of these writers ignored politics, focusing instead on blighted intimate relationships, and those
few who did explore the aftereffects of repression dealt with private mourning and intrapsychic distress.
However, three important novels published in the last five years blame Chiles apolitical, privatizing stance
for helping undermine the human relationships of their authors generation. Av. 10 de julio Huamachuco
(2007) by Nona Fernndez, Estrellas muertas (2010) by lvaro Bisama, and Formas de volver a casa (2011)
by Alejandro Zambra contrast with two explicitly political novels written several years earlier by members
of same generation: Andrea Jeftanovics Escenario de guerra (2000) and Nicols Pobletes Rplicas (2003).
By tracing changes in a lexicon of tropes that all five writers share, I detect a shift from portraying psychic
pain to reviving the political activism of Chile in the 1980s and acknowledging in the public sphere the
dictatorships crimes.
Keywords: Alejandro Zambra, lvaro Bisama, Andrea Jeftanovic, Chilean novel/novela chilena, Nicols
Poblete, Nona Fernndez, treatment of dictatorship/modo de tratar la dictadura

he acclaim that has met Los 80, a TV drama aired since 2008 on Sundays during primetime by Chiles Canal 13, shows that many Chileans now wish to revive their memory
of a bleak period in Chilean historyso bleak that novelist Jos Donoso titled his novel
about that time La desesperanza (1986). Los 80, set between 1982 and 1987, in the last decade
of Pinochets dictatorship, portrays the fictional Herrera family as it contends with economic
precariousness, the earthquake in 1985, and also political repression. Chiles will to revisit its
painful recent past was not always so strong. Despite the 1991 Rettig Report of the governments
Comisin Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliacin, which identified by name those killed under
Pinochet, public acknowledgment of state terror was grudging during the first ten years of the
transicin. Chilean society had been shaken between 1973 and 1990 by the killing of more than
three thousand people by agents of the state, the torture of tens of thousands more, and the
exile of at least 7% of the population. For the most part, however, Chileans initially consigned
to the private sphere the process of recovering from this personal and civic trauma. Punishable
actions perpetrated by the state became personal mourning, whereas the unmentionable political
conflict became a psychic, individual conflict (Cornejo, Rojas, and Mendoza 115). So reluctant
were many Chileans to allude to past wrongs that when in 200304 a second government truth
panel, the Comisin Nacional de Prisin Poltica y Tortura, interviewed 28,459 people whohad
been jailed as political prisoners under the dictatorship, most had never told anyone what
hadhappened to them during their incarceration (Cornejo, Rojas, and Mendoza 127). Ninetyfour percent of them had been tortured (Valech Report 308).
Recently, however, many Chileans have begun to reappraise the aftereffects of dictatorship
in explicitly political terms. No group more vividly reveals this trajectory from private to public
AATSP Copyright 2014

Hispania 97.4 (2014): 61222

Friedman / Reemergence of Chiles Political Memory

613

discussion of the Pinochet years than do Chileans born during the 1970s. By now a number
of novelistsamong them lvaro Bisama, Alejandra Costamagna, Nona Fernndez, Rafael
Gumucio, Andrea Jeftanovic, Andrea Maturana, Lina Meruane, Nicols Poblete, and Alejandro
Zambrahave come of age as a recognized literary generation more recent than the so-called
generacin del ochenta or nueva narrativa chilena. These younger writers experienced
the dictatorship as children and collectively speak as second-generation survivors of Chiles
nationaltrauma.
Nearly all of them grew up inside Chile (only Rafael Gumucio was among the 800,000 Chileans who fled into exile) and none of their parents were tortured or disappeared.1 As children,
they were aware that political matters could not be broached and that there were spies among
their schoolmates.2 One might have thought that, when democracy resumed, they would turn
eagerly to political topics that had been taboo: for example, the demise of the socialist project,
Chiles reluctance to prosecute violators of human rights, or the neoliberal policies of the governing Concertacin. By and large, they did not, or at any rate not directly or at once. What has
most characterized their writing until very recently has been its reticence about the dictatorship.
In their reticence about the ills of their parents generation, these writers were, of course,
not alone; they participated in a conspiracy of silence to which most Chileans acquiesced in
the decades following the resumption of democracy. The coalition under which Chile restored
electoral norms retained the neoliberal policies put in place under Pinochet, whose effect
had been to depoliticize civic life. Sociologist Toms Moulin observes, las instituciones
socioeconmicas fundamentales de la dictadura, su concepcin despolitizada de la poltica y
su cultura individualista, competitiva y adquisitiva han conseguido reciclarse exitosamente en
democracia (10). Consensus formed around the idea that Chile should embrace modernization and connect as intensely as possible with the global economy. Steep growth in Chiles GDP
(averaging 4% per year since 1999), the extension of credit to a wide swath of the middle and
lower middle class, and a boom in advertising, particularly on television, produced a binge of
consumption. Today, mall-going Chileans avidly discuss whether to buy a cell phone from Entel
or from Claro and whether, by paying 120% of the cost of consumer goods, they can purchase
them on the installment plan. Prosperity has defused interest in politics, which actually waned
under the five presidencies of the Concertacin (19902010). Small wonder that, as Jorge Larran
confirms in his 2001 book titled Identidad chilena, [u]n rasgo identitario ms o menos reciente
de la modernidad chilena es la despolitizacin relativa de la sociedad (22123).
The novels and stories of Chileans who were children under Pinochet reflect this avoidance
of political issues. With a few notable exceptions, their works focus not on political questions but
instead on blighted families and failed intimacy. As Juan Armando Epple has pointed out, the
topos of the dysfunctional family dominates their narratives (109).3 Noting that Chilean literature
often casts the family home as metaphor for nation, Epple perceives in the riven families of these
writers work nostalgia for filiacin, a sense of belonging thwarted by Chiles post-national,
commercial society that casts aside la memoria pblica, de improbable recuperacin (108).
Asimilar but darker view, voiced by Jos Bengoa, is that Chiles traumatization, el terror de
Estado a que fue sometida la sociedad chilena, toda, durante casi veinte aos, provoc el refugio
de las personas en sus mundos privados (18). Andrea Jeftanovic, a member of this group of
writers, regards in still a different light the absence of the overtly political in her generations texts.
She asserts that she and her generational peers do unfailingly inscribe a response to dictatorship
but that it is reprocessed within the personal sphere:
Si bien haba una referencia constante al pasado histrico recientela dictadura, ste estaba
inserto en coordenadas descontextualizadas de espacio y tiempo, . . . donde la historia como
punto de referencia se descompona. Es decir, su motor principal sigui siendo la experiencia
de violencia y desquiciamiento del sistema de vida y valores de la sociedad chilena en la
ltima dcada. Sin embargo, las tradicionales oposiciones entre opresores y oprimidos,

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Hispania 97 December 2014

entre victimarios y vctimas, entre idealistas y mercenarios, fueron desplazadas hacia otros
territorios: los del erotismo, la marginalidad, el inconsciente, la historia privada, la culpa
compartida, la violencia encubierta. (Garca-Corales 199)

However one accounts for the decidedly personal bent of writers who experienced Pinochets
regime while very young, it is possible to detect in their most recent works a changed attitude
toward political engagement. This shift is apparent in five representative novels written between
2000 and 2011 by writers born during the 1970s. These texts share a common theme. All five
writers anatomize how growing up under dictatorship has impaired their generations ability to
sustain deep-seated intimacy with a partner or spousethat is, their very capacity to love. The
two earlier novelsAndrea Jeftanovics Escenario de guerra (2000) and Nicols Pobletes Rplicas
(2001)focus upon intrapsychic processes like guilt and anger that play out within the mind of
individual characters. In contrast, the three more recent worksNona Fernndezs Av. 10 de julio
Huamachuco (2007), lvaro Bisamas Estrellas muertas (2010), and Alejandro Zambras Formas
de volver a casa (2011)explore dictatorships legacy within a broader social frame. Implicitly,
these three more recent novels argue that communal engagement and the clear acknowledgment
of past political wrongs form a necessary undergirding for intimate life in current Chilean society.
These five writers, in common with others born in the 1970s, deploy to a remarkable degree
what amounts to a shared lexicon of images whose variants appear in many literary texts.
The ubiquitousness of deceased or damaged children, a staple leitmotif, hints that the writers
themselves, children of a generation of victims, feel impaired. Another key image alluding
to the danger of modernity is the wrecked car, bus or train in which so many characters die.
Earthquakes commonly serve as metaphors for seismic political events. Yet another constant,
one Epple points out, is the metatextual nature of these works, which posit literary creation as
a therapeutic, restorative act. My analysis will point out changes in the way these images function, changes that reflect this generations new wish to link personal to overtly political themes.
Andrea Jeftanovics Escenario de guerra and Nicols Pobletes Rplicas explore the enduring
psychological effects of political violence. Each in its own way asserts that time does not heal
all wounds and that for survivors, coping with an intrusive, damaging past is steady work, that
must be accomplished privately through creative acts. Jeftanovic depicts the personal mourning
of her protagonist, Tamara, while Poblete focuses on the compulsion of victims to take revenge.
Tamara, the damaged child so common in this generations writings, has grown up by the
time Escenario de guerra begins. Looking back on a childhood marked by the successive loss of
parents, siblings and any semblance of home, she reconstructs her girlhood for her own eyes.
Tamaras parents are Holocaust refugees. (Jeftanovic sets the wartime atrocities that Tamaras
family has fled not in Chile but in Serbia, first during World War II and then during the Bosnian
conflict of 199295, but no reader would mistake her allusion to the problems many Chileans
faced, particularly those who fled into exile.) When the family emigrates to a South American
country we take to be Chile, difficulties both psychic and practical beset her parents. Neither
can marshal the steadiness to earn a living or nurture their children. Tamaras guilt-ridden father
hoards food and eats compulsively, suffers recurring nightmares of excrement, and barricades
himself behind the newspaper he is loath ever to put down. Wartime memories leave him so
repelled by blood that he rejects his daughter when she menstruates. Tamaras mother, heedless
of her children, has multiple affairs, tries to kill herself with sleeping pills, and, when she recovers
sufficiently to come home from the psychiatric hospital, has entirely erased Tamara from her
memory. She acts as if Tamara does not exist, at one point even shutting the door of their home
in her daughters face. Tamaras parents are destitute. To raise money they sell off their household
goods, including the childrens toys; they move from their home to temporary housing; and,
finally, failing to muster the resources or comity to live together at all, they parcel the children
out to live with aunts. Tamaras father eventually dies in a car wreck, drunk behind the wheel.

Friedman / Reemergence of Chiles Political Memory

615

The novel describes Tamaras painful accomplishment of the complex task of mourning
for the childhood happiness she missed, for her recently dead father, and for her lover Franz,
who has committed suicide.4 She understands that until she systematically revives the pain of
these losses she will never move beyond them. Vivo en el pasado, she reflects, no alcanzo a
entrar en el presente (Jeftanovic 132). The past she inhabits, and that inhabits her, is not just
her own experience but the traumas her parents have lived: Vivo fuera de plazo. Sumergida
en una poca que no me pertenece. Estoy en lugares en que nunca he estado presente (30). To
exorcise her trauma, Tamara must relive it, and as her memories emerge, they crowd out her
everyday routine: Mi infancia comienza a poblarme, a invadirme de ausencias, me deja tan
poco espacio para vivir el presente (77). Tamaras examination of her past takes many forms:
the journal she keeps, psychotherapy, and two journeys, one to reconnect with her estranged
half-sister Adela and the other to visit her fathers homeland. But the most important way she
confronts past losses is by imagining a theatrical enactment of her life on a mental escenario de
guerra, a work for which she serves at once as playwright, character, and audience. The novel is
divided into three acts of a drama, most of whose scenes represent episodes from Tamaras life,
staged in her mind so that she can process her grief. Tamaras is a solitary enterprise. Not only
are the relationships she evokes imperfect and unsustaining, but in her re-creation the figures
in her life rehearse their parts alone, each closeted in his or her own dressing room. When, in
Act III, they appear together on stage, it is not to interact but to deliver monologues. Only when
the curtain comes down and they join hands to take a collective bow do the actors in Tamaras
story grasp por un instante . . . la misma cuerda de vida (185).
Escenario de guerra ends with this moment of hopefulness as Tamaras mental dramaturgy,
a narrative process addressed solely to herself, enacts a reconciliation. Nicols Poblete, many
of whose works deal with sadism and psychopathology, is less sanguine than Jeftanovic, whose
Tamara is able to overcome the evils of the past. The title of his novel, Rplicas, which means both
aftershocks and replies, refers to the legacy of Chiles political upheaval, emotional temblors
that victims continue to feel years after their trauma, as evidenced by their need to perform
reparative acts and, most particularly, by their compulsion to take revenge.5 For Poblete, one
act of cruelty spawns others. The torture of Eduardo, one of the books three main characters,
has left him physically mutilated by Pinochets police and therefore primed for rage. He betrays
Ana, the mother of his child, with her best friend, knocks out Anas teeth, and pulls out her hair
in a spasm of domestic abuse, and, when he flees into exile in Canada, abandons Ana to raise
as best she can their son, Carlos, who is developmentally disabled. In this text, the damaged
child typical of this set of works is genetically impaired, which conveys Pobletes view that harm
visited on one generation inevitably stunts the next.
The novels main character is Ana and, like Tamara, she writes in order to come to terms with
political violence. In moments stolen from her job as a freelance editor, she saves on her hard
driveor summarily deletesa series of textual fragments based on her own life. Long before
we can infer what the original trauma (Eduardos torture) has been, these narrative pieces show
us vividly the aftershocks of trauma, associations Anas mind retrieves involuntarily andwithout
surcease. Images of teeth and dental fillings, fish and the knives that slit them open, and the death
of small creatures constantly erupt in Anas writings and intrude upon her thoughts. A kitchen
grater looks to her like the gills of a fish she has gutted; the metal fillings she spits into the dentists
basin remind her of fish scales; and an act of coitus leaves her feeling like a fish that is being
stuffed. For Ana, these constant mental associations are the unnerving sequel to dictatorship.
It is by attending to them that we eventually learn of the events that have left her obsessed with
these images: Eduardos attack has left her in need of prolonged dental reconstruction; her friend
Pazs adulterous affair with Eduardo has incited Ana to bury a dead fish in a voodoo ritual to
unleash evil on her traitorous friend; and an abortion has ended Anas affair with a man named
Patricio. It is harder for the reader to be sure what happened to Eduardo in prison, but by the

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end of the novel, we presume that he has been water boarded in a bathtub, tortured with electric
shock, and beaten so severely that his feet are permanently maimed. Yet we have only hints to
guide usrplicasnot an account of the trauma itself.
Anas writings are another kind of rplica, her means of coping with affective distress.
In his novel Poblete makes clear that imagination, which Jeftanovic viewed as therapeutic,
has a sadistic side. Anas narrative fragments coexist in the novel with a second metaphor for
the work of art, the shards of broken glass that her son Carlos, to execute revenge, piles up in
a magnum opus of his own. Bullied by his twin half-brothers, the mentally handicapped boy
painstakingly builds a trap, fills it with shattered bottles, and covers it over so his tormenters
will fall into it. This additional image of the work of art, a trap built in a patio drain, reinforces
Pobletes conviction that individual creative acts, aggressive ones as likely as not, are the only
viable reply to state terrorism.
Unlike most of the fiction by writers who were children under Pinochet, both Escenario
de guerra and Rplicas directly address the effect of secondhand political trauma. They portray
blighted families, explore individual psychology, and prescribe, whether as remedy or as revenge,
private acts of creation. However, they do not propose collective action. A more recent spate of
novels by this generation, Nona Fernndezs Av. 10 de julio Huamachuco (2009), lvaro Bisamas
Estrellas muertas (2010), and Alejandro Zambras Formas de volver a casa (2011), ask how political
apathy both during the dictatorship and after its end has sapped the affective capacity of todays
Chileans, particularly those of the authors generation. While Mapocho (2002), Fernndezs
earlier novel, directly addresses the evils of Pinochet, the earlier fiction of Bisama and Zambra
shows no trace of political themes. It is all the more striking, therefore, that their most recent
texts broach political topics.
Fernndez and Bisama evoke and share nostalgia for the 1980s, precisely because of that
decades political activism. The mid-1980s saw an awakening of low-level dissent. According
to Idelber Avelar in his study of earlier postdictatorial fiction, [t]he year 1983 marked a major
break. . . . [E]xiles began to return, censorship of books was lifted, 200,000 mourners gathered
in the streets to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Pablo Nerudas death, and a vigorous
sequence of protests culminated in a general strike called by the confederation of copper workers in May 1983 (47). To these political stirrings were added a new assertiveness in both the
arts and the social sciences. Diamela Eltits wrenching novel Lumprica (1983) won immediate
international acclaim. In the musical sphere, the Chilean new song, folk music ideologically
linked with Unidad Popular, enjoyed a revival. Meanwhile, the Facultad Latinoamericana de
Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) was promoting research into Chilean authoritarianism and the
Centro de Indagacin y Expresin Cultural y Artstica (CENECA) emphasized a turn toward
more localized objects of research (Avelar 47). This modest but discernible renaissance dwindled
in the decade following the resumption of civilian governance.
The renewed attention to the 1980s that Fernndez and Bisama revealconsonant, perhaps,
with contemporary television viewers taste for Los 80shows that Chileans, or at any rate
those who were born in the 1970s, have begun a process of mourning on a social scale, which
is breaching the figurative crypt where Chiles secrets are sequestered. In using the term crypt,
Iam borrowing not from the EC Comics series popular in the 1950s and luridly titled Tales from
the Crypt but from a 1972 essay by psychologists Nicolas Abraham and Mara Torok. In that
influential study, Abraham and Torok describe morbid, unsatisfactory mourning as that in which
the mourner encapsulates the memory of what has been lost in a crypt, an intrapsychic tomb
of silence. There it lies forever intact, unprocessable, thwarting the completion of mourning. The
three novels to which I now turn retain the emphasis on the broken family apparent in works of
Jeftanovic and Poblete, among many others. What is more, not only do they ascribe to political
causes debacles in personal life, but they also explicitly lament the absence of collective enterprise,
an absence initially imposed by repression but continued during the transicin.

Friedman / Reemergence of Chiles Political Memory

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The dual protagonists of Av. 10 de julio Huamachuco, Juan Acua and Greta Mayer, realize
in midlife that it has been a mistake to renounce the political idealism they shared as high school
students in the 1980s, and also to walk away from their incipient love. As fifteen-year-olds, they
banded with other radical youth to occupy their liceo in a protest against the regime. Twenty
years later, each looks back on the euphoria of that event and finds it richer by far than the conventional, stressful lives they are leading. Each has married and separated. Gretas daughteralso
named Greta, for she symbolizes a passionate part of her mother that is no morehas been killed
in a school bus accident. The ruined vehicle that is all but de rigueur in this set of texts is here a
collective conveyance, for Fernndez will insist on a communal, social vision. As for Juan, his
marriage dissolves when his wife, Maite, can no longer tolerate his having dropped out of society.
He has jettisoned his career as a journalist, opted out of his multitasking life, and, to signal his
non-participation in modernity, stopped his car in traffic. Holed up in his family home with a
dog named Dal, he periodically fends off a rapacious developer named Lobos who wants to buy
and raze his house to make way for a shopping mall. The same commercial project is slated to
destroy the local high school where Juans and Gretas student strike took place.
Both Juan and Greta embark on systematic reconstructions of their past that lead each
through suicide to a redemptive symbolic rebirth. Poring over memorabilia, Juan finds a newspaper picture of Greta taken during the 1985 strike. He takes time to remember that period,
and to write nostalgic letters to Greta, with whom he has lost touch. Juans letters to Greta, and
then the emails he continues to send her after his death, reconnect him to his youth. While the
messages he writes, like the analogous writings of Tamara and Ana, serve a restorative purpose,
they are shared missives, not creations addressed only to himself. Greta, meanwhile, undertakes
a different kind of creative reconstruction. Still grieving, she haunts the Avenida 10 de julio, the
Santiago street where secondhand car parts are sold, determined to build out of spare parts a
school bus like the one in which her daughter died. The eponymous [t]rece cuadras y media
destinadas a entregar un repuesto tan bueno como la pieza que se perdi (Fernndez 9) will
foster the kind of creative reworking of the past that Jeftanovics Tamara and Pobletes Ana also
carry out.
A second way in which Greta works to summon her past is by seeking out Juan. The two
separated twenty years before, each guilt-ridden for not trying hard enough to find two friends
who disappeared in police custody after the strikers arrest. Greta regrets having taken the
cowards way out: No hay posibilidad de dejar atrs lo que nos incomoda, todo regresa entre
estas cuatro paredes. . . . y entonces yo busco y espero, busco y espero, y en ese ritmo circular las
cosas giran y la condena se vuelve cclica porque esta sensacin ya la tuve antes en ese tiempo ...
que resucita para escupirme a la cara lo que no me atrev a hacer (Fernndez 172). Although by
the time she reaches Juans house he has killed himself, she settles into his quarters and dons his
clothes. On Juans computer she finds a series of emails addressed to her that he is writing from
death. There he has found a host of dead children, among them their missing comradesfromthe
student strike, little Greta, and several other child victims whose gruesome deaths the novel
describes. All are trapped, still suffering, in an underground space whose darkness isolates them
from one another.
In this way, Fernndez expands the motif of the damaged child that so many of her fellow
writers use to convey the harm done their generation, and she makes quite explicit the political
nature of this harm. Not only does the childrens purgatory remind Juan of the jail where his
fellow student protesters were housed, but also it alludes to an underground tunnel built in real
life by a sinister cult community of Bavarian immigrants. Villa Baviera, also known as Colonia
Dignidad, was founded near Parral in 1961 by a former Nazi. In the novel, as really happened, a
child falls prey to sexual abuse in the hamlets catacombs. Fernndezs readers would also know
that under the dictatorship political prisoners were tortured in the same place. In referring to
Colonia Dignidad, Fernndez points a finger at a historical atrocity sanctioned under Pinochet.

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Hispania 97 December 2014

In the end, Juan mobilizes the dead children in an asamblea that, for him, is a second
chance at political activism. The conflagration they together ignite breaches the door to the
upper world sufficiently for little Greta to escape (her mother, who has driven her school bus
into a ditch, will also return from the dead in the final scene), and the remaining victims are
gloriously fused in un solo cuerpo by a purifying flame that entusiasma, revitaliza e ilumina
(Fernndez 252). This collective body bursts forth beneath the new mall that was to have sealed
the dead children below and their emergence disrupts the ribbon-cutting of Loboss project
with a salutary earthquake. The dead children, erupting from their cryptan image that calls
to mind Abraham and Toroks theory of arrested mourningdemand acknowledgment by the
living, as one of the children exclaims: Que por lo menos a uno solo le quede claro, y no se
olvide nunca, que esto duele (Fernndez 251).
In Av. 10 de julio, Fernndez looks back nostalgically to the comparative political vitality of
the 1980s and implies that only by bringing to light injustices committed on a social scale duringthe dictatorship can todays Chileansat any rate those of Fernndezs generationendow
their intimate relationships with satisfying depth. lvaro Bisama makes the same connection
between political and private passion in Estrellas muertas, for the eponymous dead stars of his
novel refer both to the extinguished passion of the couple at the books center and to the death of
historical memory itself; Bisamas title surely alludes to two well-known works by psychologists
Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira that analyze Chileans habits of achieving political reconciliation: Las suaves cenizas del olvido (1999) and Las ardientes cenizas del olvido (2000).
As the novel opens, the couple sits in Caf Hesperia in the shabby port of Valparaso
killing time until business hours begin and they can formalize their separation. While they
wait, cindersestrellas muertasrain down, the residue from a nearby forest fire. The couples
once-happy relationship has burned out, we understand, but the fire, like earthquakes in other
parallel texts, hints at political cataclysm. Bisama loses no time in invoking Loveman and Liras
phrase ashes of oblivion; the wife, glancing at the morning paper, is shocked to see a picture
of a leftist militant she had known and admired years earlier but with whom she has lost touch.
The photo stirs the embers of her memory of a political time. She feels compelled to tell her
husband how she knows la Javiera, and we assume her narration (which constitutes much of
the book) will provide a clue as to why the wifes marriage has foundered.
The wife, we learn, came of age in the 1990s, too late to have taken part in the political activity at the end of the dictatorship. She laments that she missed the heady involvement in politics
that inspired the slightly older la Javiera. Yet her friend is an unlikely role model owing to her
tumultuous life. She abandoned a husband and son in order to immerse herself in politics; was
abused to the point of miscarrying by a jealous lover named Donoso; lived in squalor with that
lover in a flophouse in Valparaso; and drowned her second child. (The three sacrificed children
la Javiera leaves in her wake are a variant of the damaged child motif, although here the regime
itself does not directly cause infanticide.) For all the mayhem la Javiera has caused, it is clear
that the narrating wife has envied her. Both in her commitment to politics and in the ongoing
passion that she and Donoso share, la Javiera has thrown herself into life in a way the wife has
never been able to do. Ruefully, the wife admits, [y]o saba que jams hablara como ella, jams
me referira o me aferrara a las cosas con la conviccin con que ella lo haca. Jams tendra esa
capacidad para la empata inmediata, esa certeza de poder lograr alguna clase de contacto con
el otro (Bisama 27). Just as Tamara in Escenario de guerra complains that she feels like a minor
character in her own life (7576), Bisamas protagonist feels relegated to the status of testigode
algo que no le interesa a nadie (60). But the wife finds it hard to be a witness: es el testigo
quien traga las toxinas ajenas, quien se envenena con recuerdos (60). She has the unsatisfied
feeling that her life in the upscale Via del Mar of the 1990s has been fake, escenografa de
una pelcula de monstruos (82), and that she is a ghost, mostly absent from her own life (94).
In late adolescence she immersed herself in punk music and a legal addiction to cough syrup.

Friedman / Reemergence of Chiles Political Memory

619

Although her marriage has temporarily reprieved her from her generational malaise, she and
her husband have not managed to forge a successful relationship.
The man in the frame couple shares her nostalgia for something colossal and meaningful,
however gory. The paintings of a shipwreck that hang on the caf wall claim his attention, suggesting the destruction of Chiles socialist project:
Yo mir una de las fotos del naufragio. La imagen era ambigua: el hundimiento del barco bien
poda ser tambin un submarino saliendo a la superficie. O un cetceo. Record alguna vez
que fui a la caleta Quinta y camin por su ballenera abandonada. No haba nadie ah. Lo que
ahora era abandono antes haba sido un mar de color rojo sangre, lleno del olor a cadver
de ballenas gigantes muertas. La imagen del naufragio me record todo eso: la pestilencia
fantasma que nunca sent, esa factora abandonada, la sensacin horrible de que lo nuestro
se rompa de modo irremediable. (Bisama 55)

His reflection starts out optimistically; maybe the sinking ship is a living, breaching whale. Then
his fantasy whale is dead, its stinking blood roiling the sea in a whale works. But even that drama
has eluded him; he has not been able to get close to the Chilean abattoir, for by the time he visits
the cove, the works has been closed down. The passage ends as he connects the giant dead whales
of Chilean politics to his private relationships own irredeemable collapse.
The feeling of having been excluded from momentous events haunts Zambras Formas
de volver a casa, as well, although Zambra delicately frames political exclusion as the kind of
exclusion from adult affairs that frustrates and bewilders any child. In making this analogy,
Zambra takes a different tack from Fernndez and Bisama. Rather than suggest that abstention
from politics trapped the children of dictatorship in a debilitating state of arrested mourning,
he explores the kind of childhood bond formed by those of his generation with parents who
shunned politics out of fear. Nona Fernndez has noted that mi generacin culpa consciente
o inconscientemente a la generacin de sus padres por lo que ocurri durante el tiempo de la
dictadura (Garca-Corales 217). Zambras novel does voice a reproach of his parents generation,
but it does so without bitterness, focusing instead upon a young mans problems of separation.
Formas de volver a casa integrates two narratives, one about a middle-aged writer pained by his
separation from Eme, his wife of four years, and the other a draft of that writers novel about a
childs path to independence from his parents. Both narratives recount childhood memories
and delightfully convey a boys naivet as he tries to establish an adult self and as he embarks
on a difficult, mystifying romance.
Opening with part of the protagonists fiction, Formas de volver a casa starts with two
moments in which a young boy has trouble returning home. In the first, the speaker recalls
having gotten lost when he was six or seven years old. Inadvertently taking a different route from
his mother and father, he nonetheless finds his way to his house before his parents arrive and
smugly wonders whether it is they, not he, who have gotten lost. This account of a separation
from parents, a potential trauma successfully overcome, is followed by a second that describes
the night of the 1985 earthquake. The boy, his family and their neighbors, afraid to go back into
their houses for fear of aftershocks, pitch tents and spend the night together in the street. The
boy, barred from his home, is doubly excluded from desired shelter, for when he tries to join the
girls in their tent they rebuff him as a potential rapist. Neither they nor he know precisely what
a rapist is, but they all perceive danger, whether from temblors or rapists, and face the threat
with earnestness and sangfroid.
Both of these anecdotes, charmingly alive to the innocent seriousness of children, have
political overtones and introduce us to what will become a main theme of Zambras book: the
inescapable ways dictatorship shaped the relationship of parents, even apolitical ones, to their
children. In the first case the boy who suspects that not he but his mother and father have
mistaken their way anticipates his eventual disapproval of their political apathy. His parents,

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Hispania 97 December 2014

like their neighbors in Santiagos middleclass district Maip, preserved during his childhood
a studied indifference to Pinochet, sure that the dictatorship would not bother with them.
Stubbornly, they thought of themselves as familias sin historia, dispuestas o tal vez resignadas
a habitar ese mundo de fantasa [Maip], whose streets were cheerfully named after famous
artists and musical pieces (Zambra 29). In contrast, the narrator, convinced that his whole
childhood has been predicated on the lie that nothing much was going wrong in Chile, censures
his parents repudiation of politics. As for the second anecdote, Zambra may well count on the
literary trope that likens earthquakes to political convulsions. But in any event, his portrayal of
children who are not quite in the know about serious events is soon reinforced by the political
main plot of the protagonists novel, the story of Claudia. The night of the earthquake the boy
meets Claudia, three years older than he and vastly more attuned to Chiles perilous political
state. Claudia cultivates his friendship and, flattered and intrigued, he falls under her thrall,
not perceiving that she wants to manipulate him for political ends. She enlists him to spy on a
secretive man named Ral, who lives alone in the house next door to the boy. Years later, the
boy will learn that Ral was Claudias father, a leftist in hiding from Pinochet. But Claudia has
deemed his nine-year-old self unworthy of entering the world of politics and has relegated him
to a subordinate role.
The story of Claudia in two ways points to the narrators estranged wife Eme, who, like
Claudia with the boy, keeps the protagonist at an emotional distance. In addition, a childhood
anecdote of Emes has inspired the speakers novel. As a girl, Eme once played hide and seek
with her friends until well after dark, supposing that her parents would be upset. When, still
unbidden, she goes home, she finds the adults weeping and talking about people killed in a
police raid. Eme recalled, Los nios entendamos, sbitamente, que no ramos tan importantes.
Que haba cosas insondables y serias que no podamos saber ni comprender (Zambra 56). The
protagonist concludes, La novelathe real storyes la novela de los padres. . . . Crecimos
creyendo eso, que la novela era de los padres. Maldicindolos y tambin refugindonos, aliviados,
en esa penumbra. Mientras los adultos mataban o eran muertos, nosotros hacamos dibujos en
un rincn. Mientras el pas se caa a pedazos nosotros aprendamos a hablar, a caminar, a doblar
las servilletas en forma de barcos, de aviones (56).
The napkin origami to which Zambras generation were consigned is a form of apolitical
creation like that of the musicians and artists after whom Maips streets are named. In contrast, Zambra here politicizes the act of writing; his protagonist inserts in his tale of Claudia
the sinister politics that, as a child, he seldom detected in his own life. Often, as we progress
through the novel, we read first the fictional reworking of a scene and only then the episode
in the protagonists life that it recasts. Whereas the original event has been apolitical, its reelaboration as part of the Claudia narrative incorporates politics. For example, we follow the
boy as, at Claudias behest, he daringly crosses Santiago to trail a mysterious young woman who
has stayed overnight with Ral. It will turn out that the girl is Claudias older sister, and that he
follows her to their familys home. Later we find that this scene corrects a painful episode from
the protagonists childhood: resenting his fathers rules, he declared that he would rather be an
orphan. His parents make a great show of emancipating him, to the point that he feels banished
from childhood and the family home. He takes a long bus ride to an unfamiliar part of the city,
an adventure as he lived it but an unpleasant one. In his fictional reworking of his childhood, he
removes his parents punitive rejection; invests his quest with pleasure at his own intrepidness
and the hope of impressing Claudia; and makes his destination a family home like the one from
which he had been expelled. And he invests with political overtones an event he first thought
of in personal terms as a childs rebellion against his parents, for Ral is living underground, a
fugitive from Pinochet.
Reinstating in the (fictional) story of his childhood its backdrop of dictatorship ultimately
helps Zambras speaker to forgive his disappointments in his parents, in Eme, and in himself.

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621

At the end of Formas, when Eme goes her own way and the speaker, though he still loves her,
does not try to hold her back, the speaker understands both why his parents chose to keep their
heads down during the dictatorship and why he will passively allow Eme to go: if his father
and mother have not wanted to expose themselves to the wrath of the regime, he is unwilling
to risk a passion Eme might reject. His hard-won self-knowledge permits him to go home
again, not to change the imperfections of the past, but to settle into a new way of loving his
parents and his estranged wife. Zambra signals this reconciliation by ending his novel with
two motifs common to the fiction of his generationearthquakes and carsand by changing
their emotional valence.
The novel ends, as it began, with an earthquakethat of 2010but this time the seismic
shaking does not stand for political unrest; Zambra deploys a stock image, divesting it of the
connotation it has in so many narratives of his peers. The protagonist, alone when the temblor
strikes, feels compelled to make sure that both Eme and his parents are unharmed, and he does
so but without rushing to their side. Sitting in his flat, watching cars pass on the darkened street,
he notes that none of the vehicles is a model his father ever drove. The Peugeot 404 on which his
father lavished many hours had been wrecked, he recalls, in a collision with an old truck, but
his prudent father, wearing a seatbelt, had not been killed. The cars in Zambras novel are not
the deathtraps we have seen in parallel novels, but havens instead. Elegiacally, the novel ends
as the speaker thinks quietly about all the children asleep in the back seats of all the cars that
are in the street, and about all of them remembering, years later, the old car in which they once
rode so safely with their parents.
Formas de volver a casa, like the latest novels of Fernndez and Bisama, moves to reinscribe historical memory in the fiction of their authors generation. Moving beyond earlier
works that portray failed intimacy, or prescribe remedies for political trauma in the personal,
psychic sphere, these three novels diagnose the harm that political apathy has done to human
relationships and call for a collective acknowledgment of it. A passage from Zambras novel,
humorous in tone but telling in its import, alludes to this repeated retrieval of the politics of
the dictatorship, a retrieval that each time proves imperfect and provisional but that is crucial
nonetheless. Zambras speaker, as a boy, inadvertently deletes part of a cassette belonging
to hisparents, obliterating the refrain of Raphaels pop song Qu sabe nadie. Desperate to
hidehis transgression, he records and re-records his own voice singing the absent passage,
hoping hisparents will not notice the erasure in the tape. The narratives of those who, children
during the dictatorship, are now recording over a lacuna are moving to disinter their nations
political skeletons. With their work, they are helping to breach a crypt of memory that has held
hostage an overdue process of mourning.

NOTES
1
Alejandra Costamagna is the daughter of an Argentine couple living in exile because of their
leftwingviews.
2
I rely on my interviews with Alejandro Zambra and Andrea Jeftanovic, conducted in July 2010, for
this information. In addition, the slightly older writer Mauricio Electorat depicts spying within Chiles
universities in his novel La burla del tiempo (2004).
3
Though Epple focuses on three women writers (Fernndez, Jeftanovic, and Meruane), his observation,
that what he calls nationthe State, civil society, and public questions in generalfigures scarcely at all
in this generations writing applies equally to male writers.
4
Lagos points out that, in creating a self-reflexive text, Tamara is engaged in constructing her own
subjectivity. While my reading emphasizes mourning rather than the making of selfhood, both Lagos and
I show Tamaras afflictions as motivating her need to portray herself for herself.
5
Eltit, in a review of Rplicas, notes that in Pobletes text se extiende el golpe de estado chileno a la
manera de un terremoto que ya ha invadido la totalidad de la geografa nacional, afectando con su sismo
histrico a los cuerpos y sus devenires sociales . . . .

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Hispania 97 December 2014

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