Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North

Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's "Heading South, Looking North: A BilingualJourney" and Albertina Carri's film "The Blonds"Author(s): Valeria WagnerSource: Discourse, Vol. 27, No. 2/3, Hostly and Unhostly Mediums (Spring & Fall 2005),pp. 155-178Published by: Wayne State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389731 .Accessed: 24/07/2013 04:28

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Unhostly Historical Discourses in

Ariel Dorfman's Heading South ,

Looking North: A Bilingual Journey and

Albertina Carri's film The Blonds

Valeria Wagner

The following pages discuss two very specific and different attempts to cope with "unhostly" historical discourses.1 Whereas in Ariel Dorfman's autobiography, Heading South , Looking North: A Bilingual Journey , fails to mediate experience and self-understanding, in Albertina Carri's film, The Blonds, it invests the present with inassimilable and hostile remnants of the past. In the case of Dorf- man's text, the narrator is left "homeless" when the historical discourse through which he interprets the events in his life breaks down, and his account strives to rework the terms that articulate the story of his life to a history that he might again inhabit. By contrast, Carri's film attempts to disengage both memory from biography and biography from history, as it works against the demands made on a younger generation by a historical discourse intended to redeem a devastating past. Both the autobiography and the film exploit the possibilities of their respective mediums, which, to some extent, also orient their angle of approach to historical discourse: Dorfman's account addresses the relationship between different, sometimes contradictory or mutually exclusive narrative levels; Carri's film raises the question of how historical discourse structurally mediates the perception of the everyday,

Discourse, 27.2 & 27.3 (Spring and Fall 2005), pp. 155-178. Copyright 2007 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.


156 Discourse 21.2 & 3

and with it, the perception of oneself, of the past, and of memory. Although their concerns and strategies respond to particular needs and contexts, both works have to address, to either transform or invalidate, the mechanisms of identification and the operations of prosopopoeia through which historical discourse tends to construe its narrative coherence. The discussion will focus on how the autobiography and the film do this, working with or against their given historical discourses whose inconsisten- cies, contingencies and remnants they "welcome," albeit in different ways.

1. The Faces of History

In a recent film for children, The Ant Bully , a child who de- stroys ant nests to vent his anger at being bullied by a bigger, stronger peer, is shrunk to the size of his victims and condemned to live with them until he assimilates their mores. In due time, of course, the protagonist will identify with the community of ants and with their ethical principles, will save them from a greater danger than he was himself, and will eventually recover his normal size, having learned the virtues of collective action, solidarity and community. On the other side of the screen, the infant audience presumably assimilates this lesson on bullying and abuse of power, absorbing principles of good citizenship, responsibility, respect for others and other forms of life, etc. Ultimately, however, children might learn less from the rather simple and straightforward "mo- rality" of the plot than from the various strategies the film displays to deal with the more troubling and complex issues raised by the experience of the insect-human scenario which it rehearses. For, as anyone knows who has willingly, sadistically or indifferently, either crushed an ant or consciously refrained from doing so, the initial feeling of omnipotence at the ease with which life can be disposed of is more often than not clouded over by the awful thought that humans can, just like insects, unexpectedly succumb to, or be spared by, events. In either case, arbitrariness prevails, exposing the frailty of human will with respect to events and the latter' s impending threat to narrative sense.

This threat is staged in The Ant Bully in the anthropomor- phized ants' initial vision of the child: while still his normal size, he figures in the insects' pantheon of good and bad divinities as "the Destructor," an irrational force that disrupts the daily life of the ant-community, destroying their communal efforts and their


Spring and Fall 2005 157

organization without an identifiable ethos. Here, the human experience of vulnerability is projected unto the insects, who are made to perceive humans' (imagined?) omnipotence in the same way that humans perceive those events that overrule them. But the arbitrary forces to which humans are subject are humanized by anal- ogy when the "Destructor" is shrunk to the ants' size, allowing the insects to envisage the source of danger and engage it on equal terms, transforming blind Fate into a seeing, reasonable, and com- prehensible force. On his side, as he is forced, at insect-level, to face what was before (and can no longer be) the object of exertion of his irrational power, the child must acknowledge the relativity of his omnipotence, and is consequently able to recognize that of others - which he demonstrates when, having recovered his normal size, he fends off the bully that used to terrorize him. Most important, perhaps, having become the face of the events that dis- rupted the ants' lives, the child understands that the disruptions in his own life may have "faces" in turn, that they may well be reasoned with, as the ants reasoned with him, and that they may even "learn," that is, change, be integrated in an argument or within a bounded narrative. At the end of the film, when the do- mestication of the inhuman forces conjured by the insect-human scenario is fully achieved, the child resumes his place and stance in the human world, which further closes upon the already anthro- pomorphized insect world and subsumes into itself both divine and natural agencies.

The absorption of non-human agencies into a humanized sphere of events and actions sets the conditions for the constitution of a properly historical discourse, the comforting folds of which provide refuge from arbitrariness as well as the medium - a home of sorts - in which sense is at once conveyed and upheld: events have agents, agents have faces, faces have language and can be spoken to, they are inscribed in given social and political contexts, they relate to other faces, they can be narrated and acquire meaning and value. Clearly, though, historical discourse can neither contain nor mediate all events, and the chain of identifications that could ward off the danger inherent to the insect-human scenario is bound to break at different times in a person's or a community's life - events will disrupt what is perceived, retrospectively, as a course of life; the narrative of one's life, or that of a community, will be on hold, as if the "natural" link that sustained the sense of belonging between a group and its members were severed. Then, we might say, the stones of history are lifted, uncov- ering helpless swarming insects:


1 58 Discourse 27.2 & 3

Could the difference between living and dying really just grind down to this: destiny or fate or sheer dumb wonderful idiotic luck or whatever you want to call it? And life is just one more accident in an accidental universe? And we are no more than insects played with by a demented , impenetra- ble faceless force that offers no reasons because there are none?

Or is there an explanation? (37, emphasis mine)

These anguished words are triggered by Ariel Dorfman' s recollec- tion of the series of events that, against all probability, prevented him from being - and dying - by Allende' s side at Chile's presidential palace La Moneda , on September 11, 1973. This is the date of the military take-over that put an end to the dream of peaceful revolution in Latin America and deprived Dorfman of the historical medium within and through which he had come to understand his life. Indeed, as we find out throughout his account of his jour- neys back and forth between South and North America, Spanish and English (whence the title of his autobiography, Heading South , Looking North. A Bilingual Journey ) , Chile and its revolution had become for Dorfman the "place in history," the "real community" (7) for which he hungered ever since, as a child, he imagined a fictive one to safeguard himself "from death and loneliness" (7). In the Revolution he had heard the promise of a common story for himself and the "crowd" (245), a home in one language and one culture. The narrative of his life had espoused that of the Rev- olution, the latter had welcomed him in its making; the military take-over breaks up this idyllic relationship between biography and history. While it foregrounds the fictional nature of this idyll, Dorf- man's autobiographical account will attempt to make sense of this fallout and to weave individual and historical narratives into each other.

The narrative alternates chapters that relate Dorfman' s life "from the beginning" - literally, his birth - to the time of the military take-over, with chapters that recount chronologically the fatal date and the following days, thus foregrounding the design to "join" these two storylines anew on the very same temporal spot in which they are figured as departing. They never do, of course, because there is no such precise moment - his survival is a "non- event," a death that does not take place. But the story lines "meet" in the Epilogue, where Dorfman figures himself on the plane, on his way to the North, on the tangent between the "circle in his life" that is ending and that which is about to begin. This image signals the harmonization of the different rhythms of the alternat- ing chronological relations, and works on the genre of the chronicle with which Dorfman nuances his autobiographical account. As the chapter titles (except the epilogue) indicate - all beginning



with "A chapter dealing with the discovery of . . - readers are referred to the chronicles of the discovery and conquest of the Indies, which have not only marked Latin American literary and political discourse, but have been constituted as the rhetorical be- ginnings of American history. The chronicles, of course, are fa- mous for what, from a modern perspective, appears as a lack of historical rigor and as a confusion between fact and fiction. In the case of Dorfman' s text, referring to these unreliable and also hy- brid testimonies foregrounds the fictional and mixed nature of the autobiographical storyline and also affirms its inextricable relation to historical accounts, which the chronicles anchor in eye-witnessing and storytelling. Dorfman's tangential position at the end of the text thus figures a mode of continuity between fiction and fact, chronicle and story, autobiography and history. The ending in circles figures, in turn, Dorfman's continuation of the "pursuit of meaning" (193) which he considers a defining trait of Latin America and whose beginning he traces to the early chroniclers' attempts to translate the new reality in the old language, their efforts to deal with "the dissonant gap between a savage reality and a supposedly civilized language that never managed totally to bag and apprehend it" (193). Like the first chroniclers, then, Dorfman takes it upon himself to fill in the "dissonant gap" between "the savage reality" and historical, civilized discourse hollowed out by the fall of Allende.

Elegant and masterful as they are, however, these narrative strategies do not cover up the text's difficulties to restructure both historical and autobiographical patterns around the author's "savage" - loose, uncontrolled, discursively inassimilable - survival. "I should not be here to tell this story," are Dorfman's opening words; "[i]t's that simple: there is a day in my past [. . .] when I should have died and did not" (3). The belief that he should have died partly renders a realistic estimation of the situation - that is, he could have died - and partly demonstrates the guilt proper to survivors - he owed it to those who died, to have died by their side (and in his case the feeling of debt is all the more pungent that a friend actually exchanged places with him that fateful day, going to the presidential palace in his stead) . But the imperative under- tone of Dorfman's assertions suggests that his survival is even more disappointing than it is unlikely : "Is that all? Is that it? No more than a series of arbitrary intercessions had spared me?" (37). Because it is hazardous and arbitrary - as it would not be, we surmise, had it responded to historical reasons - his survival paradoxically cheats him of a meaningful life. This is apparent in the quotation discussed above, in which the threatening insect-human scenario


1 60 Discourse 27.2 & 3

is very specifically conjured up by Dorfman' s historically unac- countable survival, which transforms us all into insect toys of a "demented" and "faceless force" whose indifference to human existence questions the difference between life and death: "Could the difference between living and dying really just grind down to this: destiny or fate or sheer dumb wonderful idiotic luck or whatever you want to call it?" (37). Although the "differences" Dorf- man mentions are by no means equivalent ("destiny or fate" are not quite the same as "dumb wonderful idiotic luck"), they have in common a disavowal of historical pattern, with respect to which they all appear as terms for chance or accident.

From this perspective, death acquires a certain romanesque glamour, which Dorfman himself acknowledges explicitly when he comments on Allende's daughter's belief that he was , in fact, at La Moneda and by the president's side the day of the military take over, and that he was, undeniably, a hero.2 Her words still taunt him, he tells us, partly because they remind him of his narrow escape from death, and hence that he could indeed have been there and be now dead: "it would be my face on a poster while somebody else in exile accompanies the widow up the steps to meet some Minister of Foreign Affairs [. . .]" (57). But partly, of course, they also remind him that he should have been there, following the necessity of the revolutionary struggle, in which case he would have been a hero:

[S]he presented me, all over again, with the ending I had planned for myself, the way I would like to have been remembered, the way I had deliberately constructed my definitive revolutionary committed persona during the months that preceded the coup, she placed me boldly face- to-face with the radical Ariel I had sworn loyalty to [...]. (57)

In other words, had Dorfman died the day he "should" have died, he would have entered the annals of heroic history, and his death would have served as an argument against the military takeover, lending his face to the revolution. His life would then have taken value from a meaningful death. Alive and deprived of historical fundament, however, he is but a small insect running for cover, left to face what he is not - not dead, not a hero of the revolution, not quite as human as he thought he was. Alternately, whereas his death would have confirmed the existence of a historical pattern, his survival argues against it, and in favor of the devaluation of life, which thus seems to be irremediably at odds with the course of history.

Aware that this tendency to overvalue death responds to the narrative necessities of a specific historical discourse, Dorfman de- nounces the temptation to "persist as a legend rather than a life"


Spring and Fall 2005 1 61

(55). He does not, however, give up the category of history alto- gether, nor indeed, his claim for a place in it. Much of his narrative skills will be devoted to rehearsing ways of harmonizing, if not rec- onciling, the "faceless force" of chance with the imperatives of historical pattern. In order to do so, he naturally sets out to reduce the role the former plays, by reconstructing the chain of events that result in his survival and pinning down its links to specific agents - basically a series of operations of prosopopoeia, through which the "faceless force" acquires specific visages. It will turn out, most importantly, that one of the events in the chain that saves his life does not only have face, but also has a purpose. The face is that of Fernando Flores (38), who "saves" Dorfman from being summoned to defend the presidential palace by crossing out his name from the emergency list. He does so, moreover, because "somebody had to live to tell the story" (39). Thus, what had seemed to Dorfman a hazardous omission (nobody called him) becomes a reasoned decision that he can make his own: "It is a comforting idea," he comments, "that I was spared because I was to be the storyteller" (39). Comforting, we surmise, because it offers him a reason and an explanation for his survival, at least as long as he keeps on telling stories that retrospectively validate Flo- res' sense-making decision to appoint Dorfman "to put history right and not let it take its mad course" (40). Comforting, also, because the task of storytelling will allow him to keep "a promise to the dead," inscribing in history those who, unlike him, did not survive the end of the revolutionary dream. Finally, comforting because, armed with a reason and a mission, he can inscribe himself as well in the historical medium he is intent to recreate. "If it is not true that this was why I was saved, I have tried to make it true" (39-40).

Dorfman readily grants that such a "comforting idea" does not suffice to account for all the particulars of his survival, nor for the death of those with whom he would have perished had things been otherwise, as it does not "beat back the fear that life is blind and hazardous and that we [. . .] try to fool ourselves into believing there is a pattern to all this" (39). Blind chance, or arbitrariness, will always be in excess of historical pattern. But surely this precise excess is what feeds the elaboration of historical patterns, fueling the operations of prosopopoeia, identification and the various narrative strategies at work in the making of both autobiographical and historical accounts. In the case of Dorfman's account, chance - the arbitrariness of his survival - is both that which un- hinges his life story from the historical narrative he believed it espoused, and that with which he binds it to history again, reversing


1 62 Discourse 21.2 & 3

and recuperating the terms of his former belonging. Previous to his survival, Dorfman' s relationship to history and chance is pre- dominantly presented in terms of what could be considered as a rhetoric of adoption: chance is read as a choice of which he is alternately the object - -history, English and U.S. culture adopt him - or the subject - as in the case of Chile, Spanish and its culture, all of which he adopts. Once historical discourse breaks down, however, the register of adoption can no longer articulate Dorfman' s relation to history, for what is in need of articulation is historical discourse itself. As we will now see, Dorfman responds to this need by elaborating a figurai reading of history3 in which past and present are harmonized through the integration of chance in the process of decision-making.

Before he becomes a survivor, Dorfman understands unex- pected turns of events, contradictory allegiances and feelings as contributing to a hidden purpose revealed, emblematically, through the Revolution, the Master event of his conception of history. His love and knowledge of English and US culture, for instance, are a source of shame once he adopts Spanish, Chile and the Revolution, until he writes his best-selling essay on How to Read Donald Duck , in which his intimate knowledge of, and previous identification with, the North, result in "the first book written about US cultural imperialism" (251): "And now, all of a sudden, that liaison had become valuable, indispensable to free the patria in its hour of need. It had a meaning, it all fit into place: that is why I had gone to the States, that is why I had fallen in love with America" (253). With the end of the Revolution, however, this vision of his historical role can no longer be sustained, there is no overall purpose from which the actions of humble agents derive their meaning. And yet, Dorfman insists, "it cannot be an accident" (251) that he, of all people, wrote that book, "a man who had himself been seduced by that country [the US] as a child," nor that he wrote it with another foreigner who had, like him, made Chile his home and wanted, like him, to "inoculate our adopted land against the perils of what we had once adored." Thus, although the book can no longer be considered as the "liaison" that casts the accidents of his life in the purposive mold of history, it is recuperated as that which, by severing another "liaison," transforms the accidents of history into crucial moments in the narrative of his life: the book is a "step" in the constitution of his bilingual identity, "an intellectual assault on the cultural core of the boy I used to be by the political consciousness of the man I had become" (251), "the culmination of my own very personal journey into Latin America, the ritual and public purging of my



last links to the United States" (252). From being an element of articulation of past and present, the book becomes an instance of figuration of one in the other: rather than smoothing out what appears incongruent (Dorfman's simultaneous love of English and Spanish, Chile and US culture), it is the perfection (finition) of what emerges as a process of rupture having begun in the past and already on the way to mending - for, as it will turn out, this very same book will be indirectly instrumental when he applies for a passport in view of returning to the US, and hence of renewing his "liaison" with it.

According to Dorfman's account, it is shortly after his survival that he discovers - and this might well be the most important of those discoveries with which all chapters of this book deal - the full potential of chance to figure history in his own life. Having heard the news of the military take-over and burning to fight by the president's side, Dorfman rushes to the presidential palace, which is surrounded by policemen. Once there, however, he turns "sud- denly and decisively from the stolid faces of the policemen" rather than towards a certain death:

And standing there, I hesitated. I had been saved, up till then, by a series of fortuitous circumstances totally outside my control. But now my life is no longer in the hands of somebody else, in the hands of chance, in the hands of some unknown divinity who decides to cross my name off a list, a friend who decides to change places with me. This time, for now, for this one everlasting moment, I am the only one who can decide whether I live or die. (53)

Clearly, he decides to live, deciding being the key term of this "defining moment, that split second" in which his attention shifts from the faces of the police, to the hands of chance and of others, to a choice between living or dying. As he goes on to explain, the choice appears as such to him only retrospectively, as he writes, "now that I have decided to probe that instant for its significance" (53). Retrospectively, then, this "everlasting moment" is the point at which he transforms chance into decision, survival into choice, and which counterbalances that other, undefined moment, impos- sible to pin down, in which he should have died, and did not. Then, we saw, his death was not only highly likely, but would have fulfilled the expectations of the heroic historical narrative in terms of which he understood his life. "Now," facing the police - the tangi- ble visage of historical catastrophe - Dorfman is forced to question the necessity of his death: ultimately, he grants, he will never know whether he left simply because he was afraid to die by Allende' s side. But what "plumbs what really went on in [his] mind the day


1 64 Discourse 21.2 & 3

of the coup" (54) is the question of how to distinguish "a death that [he] cannot avoid from a death that [he] must embrace," or yet, that of how to make sure that he dies "the right death" (54).

How, indeed? The first case is relatively easy to sort out, for an unavoidable death is one which one has presumably attempted, and failed, to avoid, but which can easily be integrated into a historical pattern. Had Dorfman been and perished at the presidential palace, for instance, his would have been an unavoidable death, and he, we saw, would have been a hero of the Revolution. Establishing what is a death one must embrace seems more diffi- cult, basically because rational, ideological or narrative imperatives, which act on the will, do not have the force and inevitability of necessity. More specifically, the idea of a "right" death which, by virtue of its "rightness," must be embraced, foregrounds the fact that this imperative is in fact optional, subject to judgment and criteria that are neither predetermined nor determinant. In short, a death one must embrace is, paradoxically, precisely the death one is not bound to embrace, an avoidable one - hence Dorf- man' s decision to turn his back to the police seems to reflect his (retrospectively formulated) realization that, as he is not bound to die by Allende's side, his death is not necessary: history does not demand it, in fact it may well demand nothing at all. This understanding of history as undemanding is what eventually allows Dorf- man to consider his survival as a positive option, rather than as the side effect of not dying. History remains a force that stands over the human will, but rather than being patterned, or itself willful, it is presented as an instance of mediation of the possible. As Dorf- man states in the opening paragraphs, "history turned me, against my will, into the man who could someday sit down and write these words, who now writes them" (3) - history turns him against, but also away from his will, deviating it from the historical pattern where he believes he fits in (the death he should have died), and transfiguring the would-be-hero into a would-be-writer who, eventually, writes because he can, and not because he must.

Readers may have noticed that history becomes undemanding through the process of transfiguration beginning with Dorfman' s turning away from the faces of the police - they are not the face of the historical death he must embrace - and continuing with his dismissal of the hands of others, of chance and of divinities from the making of his life - nothing and no one is leading him, he is not being handled by unseen entities. This is the moment in which, retrospectively, Dorfman inverts the prosopopoeia that gave history a voice and set it up in conflict with chance - history



becomes faceless, a medium in which chance is integrated as possibility - and becomes the figure through whose story historical discourse recovers from its dissonances.4 It is on this occasion that Dorfman transfers agency onto himself, and first gives himself the voice that will write his autobiography, reading into it the mutual figurations of chance and history, past and present, the "before" and "after" of the non-event of his survival: "I am left here on this side of reality to remember what ends forever that day in me and in the world, still wondering why I was spared" (4) . As he wonders, of course, he will also rework what survives of that world through a reading of what survives in him. Thus, events before "that day" are shown to prefigure, to announce or to "plumb" into, those that follow the gap of the end that is not one, the non-event of survival. Critical moments are found that contain the seeds of what is later a decision: the day Dorfman does not use his US acquired baseball skills to throw a stone at the police in a march in Santiago, the day he does not kill a soldier, although he could have done so. Through these critical moments, a continuity of sense is estab- lished between the past and the present in spite of the different conceptions of history at work before and after the disruption of the military coup. Dorfman himself appears as the mediator between these two conceptions, and his autobiography as an artful reading of a continuous, unhollowed historical medium.

2. History Disfigured

Albertina Carri's film Los rubios ( The Blonds )5 bears some resem- blance to Dorfman' s autobiographical attempt to come to terms with history, as it encounters similar difficulties with historical discourse. A generic mix of documentary and fiction, the film can be considered, depending on the angle of interest, as a general inves- tigation of the conditions to which memory - autobiographical, collective, historical - is subject and from which it must, at times, be disengaged, or, alternately, as a film raising the issue of the generational transmission of a traumatic historical experience. The film states from the outset that Albertina Carri's parents were "disappeared" and then assassinated at the beginning of the Ar- gentinean military dictatorship of 1976-1983, during which, as is well known, an estimated 30,000 people suffered the same lot. At a certain point we learn that when she was around twelve years old, Carri was given the "real," historical reasons for their absence. But what she then hears is clearly a heroic version of the past, in which the "good men" fight the "bad men," perishing in the attempt.


1 66 Discourse 27.2 & 3

"I didn't understand a thing of what they told me, not a word," comments the voice-over of the actress playing Carri, "I only recall of that talk that I began to think of weapons, of shots and of heroes." This heroized version of events contrasts with a fictional reconstitution of the parents' disappearance in a scene played by animated playmobiles on an eerie music: a couple of toys are in a car on a country road at night; what looks like a space ship de- scends on them and takes them away; three little blond toys appear, stranded in the dark. Like Dorfman's "faceless force," this seemingly extraterrestrial intervention figures the limits of historical discourse, which, in one case, could not assimilate the element of chance, and in this case leaves out the child's experience of desolation that only fiction seems able to convey. Unlike Dorf- man's text, however, the film will not attempt to reconcile or inte- grate the two accounts, which are in fact presented as being already versions of each other with respect to Carri' s disconsola- tion, for, if her parents are taken away by alien powers, they remain irretrievable from the very same discourses that purport to rescue them from oblivion. Instead, the film will launch a complex process of disengagement of the parents' memory from the grip of historicizing narratives, in order to restitute, not the memories themselves, but the possibility of relating to them in the texture of the daily.

Like Dorfman's text, Carri' s film will address, and resist, the tendency to cast history in a heroic mold, for which it will have to counter both the widespread social need for the disappeared to be restituted to a narrative that can account and atone for the recent Argentine past, and the more specific expectations of a generation which, as the voice-over of the actress impersonating the filmmaker explains at a certain point, survived "a terrible epoch" and "demand [s] to be protagonists in a history that does not belong to them" ("La generacin de mis padres, los que sobrevivieron a una poca terrible, reclaman ser protagonistas de una historia que no les pertenece"). In this sense, the film stands in a different relationship to the narrative imperatives that Dorfman is up against as a survivor and "protagonist" of history. Indeed, as the daughter of two disappeared who were well known militants and influential intellectuals in their time, Carri inherits an unfinished story which others expect her to tell, but which she does not want to, and does not, tell. This demand for the storytelling is staged in the film in one of the black-and-white scenes that, marking a switch to a recognizable documentary mode, focus on the process of film- making. Albertina Carri is seen behind the camera - and hence herself being filmed - attentive to her team's discussion of a letter



from the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts announcing that her application for funds for the film has been re- jected.6 The committee considers that Carri's parents' "tragic destiny deserves ," as they awkwardly phrase it, "that this project be carried on," but that as it is, the script is not itself sufficiently de- serving, because it does not include enough interviews of the two disappeareds' friends and co-militants and fails to do justice to their intellectual and political history. Carri's team reads into this explanation the need of the members of the committee to have their own story told and their history made, a need acknowledged by the filmmaker herself, who considers it legitimate, but decid- edly generational: "they need that film, and I understand that they need it, but it is not my place to do it, or I don't feel like doing it [. . .]." If her parents' generation needs, like Dorfman, to have that history made and patched up, and a new history told to merge with their storylines, Carri and her generation need instead to opt out of the inordinate demands made on them by the tragic structure of the history they inherit.

But although the film dissociates itself from the other generation's historical project, it also acknowledges and discusses the expectations it disappoints. Up to the sequence where the committee's decision is discussed, it includes interviews that refer to the parents' political activities, as well as other elements that conform to the expectations the filmmaker's status of "daughter of disappeared" is bound to raise - there are interviews with relatives, childhood pictures, images of the clandestine center of detention where the parents had been held, and most notably, a consultation at the Center of Forensic Anthropology.7 As if confirming the committee's decision, however, the film makes no effort to constitute a coherent narrative of the parents' disappearance or of their mili- tancy. The interviews of the parents' friends and relatives are in fact presented as material on which the film works , rather than as the stuff it is made of - we only see fragments of them on a screen in what is presented as Carri's room, films-within-the-film, while the actress playing the filmmaker takes notes, writes down comments that we hear in voice-over, or turns her back on the images to fiddle with her computer. In other words, the attention focuses on the actress' treatment of the material and her reactions to it, raising the question of what is being filmed in place of the expected documentary. Similarly, in the first part of the film,8 the sequences played by the actress - who has introduced herself "formally" immediately after the headlines - are often saturated with marks of their fictionalization, as is the case with the only interview that is not mediated by a filmed screen, in which we follow the


1 68 Discourse 27.2 & 3

actress entering a building, announcing herself on the entry phone, taking the elevator, going through the door of the apart- ment, hugging the interviewed, and engaging in a preliminary dia- logue with her, until the questions begin and the sequence ends. Other sequences are interrupted, or counterpointed, by a shift to black-and-white images of the team filming the actress' rehearsals and the filmmaker's instructions and comments on her acting. These shifts draw attention to the script that is being followed in the color sequences, subjecting to analysis the role the filmmaker could be expected to play, while it raises the question of what role could be played instead or, indeed, of whether another role is at all imaginable.

After the sequence of discussion of the committee's decision, the film takes up what it had, as it were, only rehearsed or intimated before. In the first part, for instance, the team approaches the police station where the parents' had been held, while in the second part they enter it. In the same vein, whereas in the first part the interviews of friends or relatives are either clearly acted or shown on a screen-within-the screen, in the second part - with one nota- ble exception to which we will return below - the mediation of the screen is abandoned in favor of direct interviews of people in the neighborhood where Carri' s family was living at the time of her parent's abduction, and in particular of the neighbor who, consciously or not, revealed the family's location to the paramilitaries that sequestered them. The general sense is that the film is finally becoming itself after investigating the limits of being something else. This new start is clearly marked by a sequence in color in which the filmmaker explains to the actress how she should recite the text of self-introduction with which the film opens "officially" after the headings: the foundational logic of the formal beginning is thus deconstructed and replaced by that of the process of its making. Henceforth, Carri will not be systematically the black-and- white "original" of the actress, although, for reasons to which we will return, she remains doubled by her. In a very specular moment which has often been taken up to advertise the film, we see the filmmaker filming the camera that is filming her: the image is in color, marking the filmmaker's determined "entry" into the film in spite of her remaining behind the camera, and signaling a definitive shift of attention from her parents to herself, from herself to what she is filming, to the process of filming and to the subjectiv- ity of the film itself, caught bouncing back and forth between the two lenses under the audience's gaze.

The issue of "entering" the film, of what its boundaries are - when it is a fiction, when a documentary, when it stops, whether



the specular movement ever ceases - and of what it is we "enter" with it, is brought up from the outset, in the first sequence before the headings, in which we hear a voice-over shouting a question to "Alber," the filmmaker Albertina, as the camera closes on a playmobile farmhouse: "Tell me if I can get any closer . . . there . . . there, did I get in?" The toy house, figure of Carri' s reconstructed memories, will contrast unpleasantly with the house in which the family lived, outside of which the actress will relate the filmmaker's scarce memories of her parents' abduction, and with the clandestine detention center where they were held, transformed into a police station, and within which the actress is filmed looking at the traces of its former use. "I live in a country full of fissures," she states as she wanders through a park of the neighborhood; "what was the clandestine center where my parents were sequestered is today a police station." In the same manner that the camera closes upon the fissures that reveal the inarticulate superposition of clandestine center and police station, so does the film "enter" the epic and analytical distance that relatives and friends introduce, respec- tively, in their recollections of Carri' s parents. The former, we are told, transform the two disappeared parents into "exceptional persons," while the latter tend to "structure their memories in such a way that everything becomes political analysis" ("La familia, cuando puede sortear el dolor de la ausencia, recuerda de tal man- era que mis padres se convierten en personas excepcionales, los amigos estructuran el recuerdo de forma tal que todo se convierte en anlisis poltico"). In both cases, the distance with which the memories of the disappeared is processed shelters speakers and audience alike from the painful present of their absence, but this very same distance is bound to further enhance their absence in the present, feeding the pain or the discomfort that will require, again, more distancing. This mechanism is anticipated in the last interview on screen that Carri' s actress watches in the film - the one remaining interview after the sequence of the committee's letter - in which a relative, with visible sorrow, states, "It is something that does not end . . . that is what is most painful. ... it does not close. ..." ("Es una cosa como que no tiene fin. ... no hay un final, que eso es lo ms doloroso, que no puede terminar de . . . de cerrar, digamos"). Here, the relative's grief conveys syntheti- cally what has often been pointed out, namely, that those who disappear cannot be mourned like the dead, because their bodies are missing, there are no known conclusions to their stories, no narrative closures to their absence except its continuing gap. What Carri's film suggests is that this gap increases with each effort to cover it up, that measures to reconstitute the disappeared faces in


1 70 Discourse 27.2 & 3

history, to give the latter their faces, or to counter their absence with the narrative of their lives, may well be just another stage of the disappearing process, whereby the figure of the disappeared is itself made to disappear.

The alternative to the tragic history Carri and her generation inherit, then, does not reside in the elaboration of "personal" or strictly biographical accounts of the disappeared that could be iso- lated from an oppressive historical narrative. The memory of the disappeared seems, indeed, bound to recede in all narrative attempts to reconstitute it, including that of Carri herself, who, as is often mentioned in the film, remembers little, and cannot even be certain that her memories are her own: "[a] 11 I have," writes the character of Carri in her working notebook, "is a diffuse recollec- tion contaminated by all these versions." The unreliability of such memories explains her wish to film the reactions they provoke in the present, such as that of her six-year-old nephew, who says "that when he finds out who killed the parents of her mum he will go kill them." Here, however, the filmmaker stumbles against a resis- tance to the camera - the nephew's mother does not want him to be filmed, another sister only says interesting things when the camera is off - motivated, we surmise, as much by the distortions that being filmed might imply, as by the fear that it might expose the distortions of memory, or worse, that it might point out the omis- sions on which memories are reconstructed. Hence the film's stated project to "expose memory in its own mechanism: as it omits, it remembers" - which implies that memory takes place, or operates, on the fringes of narrative, or along the lines of what stories do not tell. In this sense stories would be important because they are the contact surface, as it were, of what is not recounted, of what is inevitably left out in the process of composition of past events and of their transmission through time. The camera - film - could thus be conceived as a medium capable of exposing the inarticulate leftovers of narrative, by focussing, paradoxically, either on what is not visible or is missing, or on the kind of visibility produced within the temporal and spatial gap between the time of the reminiscence and that of its taking place.

We are informed of this program once again through the in- termediary of writing - the actress writes it down in her working notebook - which foregrounds throughout the film its properly textual moments of self-articulation (comments on itself, on what it is doing, explanations of facts) and of self-distancing, also marked by the stagings, the recourse to an actress to play the filmmaker, or the black-and-white markers. Unlike the epic and the analytical distances mentioned above, which postpone or delay



a process of identification already at work, these textual distances are constant reminders that we have not entered the film, and hence that we need neither enter the sphere of suffering and pain that it inevitably evokes, nor indeed identify with those who, like the filmmaker or her actress, are as inevitably bound to inhabit it. One of the most interesting aspects of the film is in fact its investi- gation of ways of dissociating historical discourse from memory and memory from pain. As we have already seen, it doesn't only dissociate itself from the heroic history the previous generation wants to make, but it argues that this history does not in fact "belong" to its would-be protagonists. The risk of identifying with this historical discourse is self-dispossession, and similarly, identifying the disappeared with it risks further "disappearing" them into its narrative folds. Working out a narrative out of "raw" memory, however, is bound to reproduce the excruciating pain associated with past events, and this the film also refuses to endorse - as one of the members of the team puts it in the sequence of the committee's letter, "you want to talk about that, you want to tell what you suffered, I will respect it. You make a film." To the extent that this film deals, as we have also seen, with a generation that inherits the two kinds of narratives, it struggles against the pull of the identifi- catory mechanisms they put to work. The duplication of the character of Carri, daughter of the disappeared, into filmmaker and actress, is emblematic of the film's refusal to adopt identification as a strategy to address the past, for, indeed, who are we to identify with when the filmmaker interviews "her" own actress? Thus, rather than working on the various forms of narratives of the past - historical, autobiographical, biographical, testimonial - the film focuses on their leftovers, on what they cannot absorb, and which persist in visual form, as "unbearable images" ("Los que vinieron despus, como [. . .] mis hermanas, quedaron heridos, construyendo sus vidas sobre imgenes insoportables") that make their way into the lives of those who can neither claim nor rely on the consolation of history (they are neither heroes nor victims). Hence one of the conclusions the actress is made to draw: "I have to think of something, something that is film" ("Tengo que pensar en algo, algo que sea pelcula").

There is throughout the film an obvious reworking of images that bear the legacy not only of the recent past, but also of Argen- tine history or self-identification. The countryside, for instance, emblematic of the country's prosperity, appears at the beginning of the film behind barbed wire, recalling how Argentina became during the dictatorship a

" campo de concentracin ," a detention cen-

ter. Most notably, however, the film lingers, without showing it, on


1 72 Discourse 27.2 & 3

the image of the slaughterhouse, "el matadero ," a central institu- tion in a cattle-raising country, but also the title of one of the texts that inaugurate the national literature (Esteban Echeverra' s story, "El Matadero," of 1838), and which establishes a parallelism between the institutionalized violence against cows and that which the government exercises on citizens. The image in question is a photograph that, as the actress tells us, the filmmaker sees in a shop where she has gone to frame another, more "frivolous" picture of a beautiful staircase (which we have already seen, in fact, on the walls of what is supposed to be Carri's room). The picture of the slaughterhouse conveys to the friend accompanying her the certainty that its photographer has been tortured. As it turns out, this intuition is not only true, but all the more troubling in that the photographer happens to be the only survivor of the clandestine detention center where Carri's parents had been held. The photographer is contacted, and she talks about the center, but she refuses to be either filmed or recorded: "she said, 'I didn't speak under torture, I didn't testify for the CONADEP, I will not speak before a camera either'."9 This makes the character of Carri won- der how her camera might resemble a

" picana ," the instrument

of torture, and, in turn, how the photographer's camera might resemble the axe with which cattle are slaughtered. In spite of the limitations of this comparison - followed to its utmost logic, no scenes of violence could either be filmed, or represented in any way, nor indeed could injustices be recorded, or decried, etc. - the photographer's point is well taken by the film, which not only avoids representing scenes of suffering in general, but offers images that act as counterparts. Thus, instead of a slaughterhouse, we get a long sequence of the actress helping out the men of Carri's relatives' farm (significantly called

" El campito') vaccinate the cattle, with enormous syringes that could look like instruments of torture but which are at least intended to cure.

The sequence of the vaccination of the cattle is interesting at various levels. First of all, the suggestion is that what is being "cured," or vaccinated against further suffering or violence, is not the cattle itself - which will eventually be killed - but the image of the slaughterhouse and the historical imaginary it condenses. It isn't so much that governments become veterinaries and citizens remain cows to be treated with a certain civility. Rather, the image of the cattle is being "vaccinated" against its association with slaughtered animals that evoke torture and disappearances, allowing other aspects of the relationship between humans and cows, and humans and humans, to be perceived. These relationships are not, again, idyllic - indeed, the process of vaccination itself implies



a certain amount of violence - but as the still images that frame and interpret them are put in motion and reinscribed in ordinary, quotidian contexts, the present begins to disengage itself from the alienating imaginary of the past, and seems to become, gradually, an inhabitable time. This process of "vaccination" of the imaginary is, of course, not exhaustive, but it applies to the filmmaker's and to her team's, who, unable to enter the toy farmhouse at the beginning of the film, wake up in the "'-size house at the end of it, and are seen going through familiar and comforting matutine gestures. Nothing alters the atmosphere of a-day-in-the- country-with-friends except the blond wigs that, as if to illustrate the title of the film - The Blonds - all of the members put on before leaving the house. Before discussing the wigs, however, let us consider the second issue raised by the sequence of the vaccination of the cattle, which can be productively compared to the insect- human scenario evoked in Dorfman' s text.

This scenario compares best, in a sense, with the sequence of the abduction of the playmobile toys by an unidentified spaceship: here humans are not insects, but they are toys, played around by a faceless force. In the Argentine context, however, the image of the slaughterhouse might convey more poignantly the experience of a historical catastrophe and of the breakdown of historical discourse. What is terrifying in this image is that there are faces, whether they figure in the picture or not (which, recall, we do not see), and hence that we are within an already circumscribed human sphere of actions and events that historicizes chance. But if faceless forces are here human and historical, the cattle that play the role of humans are here faceless and inhuman, although hardly forceful. There is thus an inversion of sorts, whereby history is human at the expense of the dehumanized subjects it consumes, and consequently appears as a dehumanizing process or narrative, in the benefit of which citizens become faceless. We are far from the comforting vision underlying Dorfman' s text, in which history was capable of articulating the scattered facts of life and of guard- ing the daily from the wild operations of chance. By contrast, in the image of the slaughterhouse historical discourse is the agent of deprivation, under the power of which the daily disintegrates into horror. In this case, the processes of identification and of face- giving (prosopopoeia) that articulated human and inhuman forces in Dorfman's text are to no avail: indeed, the more cattle are identified to humans, the more the latter will be dehumanized, and the more the slaughterers' humanity is identified, the more history will seem inhuman. Here, again, dissociations, rather than identifications and condensations, seem to be more efficient ways


1 74 Discourse 27.2 & 3

out of this vicious circle; at least this is what seems to be suggested by the sequence that rewrites the image of the slaughterhouse in Carri's film. The first dissociation at work is that between the various activities humans develop with animals: they slaughter them, but they also vaccinate them - and among the various ways humans treat bovines, not all are necessarily comparable to the way humans treat each other. The second dissociation concerns the identification of humans to cattle, between whom there seems in fact to be little understanding: while the country guys and the actress are radiant with good will, the animals are indifferent to the humans' good intentions and seem to be, instead, rather bewildered. The sequence reminds spectators that there are distinct human and bovine perspectives, and that these cannot be assimilated to each other, thus setting precise limits to the metaphor that likens humans to bovines: the former can be treated like the latter, but they are not cattle.

To conclude with the film, let us consider how it re-appoints the most obvious of all the expectations it disappoints, namely, that of the character's search for her identity. This search is raised at the very beginning of the film, in a sequence in which the entire team interviews a woman from the neighborhood where Carri's family hid, and who, as we find out, took care of Albertina (she recalls the little girl, then three, used to fall asleep in her arms) and her sisters at the time. The sequence is in color, and could be read as being at the origin of the doubling of the filmmaker by the actress. In a striking moment, the woman asks Albertina her name, acknowledges her, and immediately denies having recognized her, persisting in this very obvious lie to the very end of the interview. However complex the woman's reasons may be for refusing to acknowledge that she has recognized the little girl in the adult woman, it is clear that they are linked to her parents' disappearance and to the national trauma they imply (the woman insists, for instance, that she helped or was helpful to Carri's family). In other words, the problem seems to be less the identity of the filmmaker - she is recognized, she continues to be, to some extent, the same , or as self-identical as anyone else can be - than its quasi-total assimilation with that of her parents and of the history they repre- sent. This assimilation seems to be unavoidable, for, as it is pointed out, the simple mention of her last name triggers reactions in certain social circles. Commenting on a quote in which the need to work on one's identity is linked to the threats it is under, the voice- over clarifies: "In my case, it is always threatened by my own last name. To construct oneself without the figure with which one's existence begins becomes an obsession."10 Unsurprisingly, the film



does not succeed in doing this, but it does work through the prin- ciple of identity and out of the figure of Carri's parents.

Reworking the defining identitary traits that are physical ap- pearance and last name, the film plays with the nickname by which the family was known in the neighborhood where they were hiding at the time of the parents' abduction. The term, as it is insisted upon, is a highly inaccurate physical description, as none of the members of the family were blond. Their only "blondness" re- sided in the fact that, in what seems to have been a rather homoge- neously low-class neighborhood, the family stood out as strangers, as being from outside and from another social class. In this, as a black-and white sequence tells us early on in the film, the family of five (there were three daughters) resembles the film crew, who, with their cameras and interviewing material, stand out in the neighborhood as much as Carri's family must have done with their typewriters and, we can imagine, their class-specific accents. In the end it is this arbitrary and involuntary "disguise" that gives the parents away to the paramilitaries, as a neighbor, whose house the latter search thinking it is Carri's, makes the connection between the family she knows as "the blonds" and the last name that she is being asked about. With its title, then, the film draws attention to the significance of this period during which the family was unidentified, "disappeared" to the authorities and "disguised" for the neighbors. It also privileges the neighbors' view of the family over that of friends or relatives, whose needs, we saw, interfere with their, and Carri's, memories. Like the sequences of the vaccination of the cattle, the interviews in the neighborhood rework the alienating image of the neighbor as the indifferent, the cowardly in- former or the evil collaborator. The neighbor who refuses to acknowledge she has recognized Carri seems to be consciously try- ing to dispel this image as she insists on her past solidarity, and, in spite of the distances she takes with the adult, she speaks of her as a child with affection. The neighbor who did inform is instead proud of being filmed (she dresses up for it, poses on the side- walk) , and willing to impart, like an "authentic," gossipy neighbor, what little she remembers of "the blonds" (she says of the mother, for instance, that she was not very pretty). But far from conveying an idyllic vision of citizens and of human relations,11 the portrayal of the neighbors, the most immediate witnesses of the missing past, works towards restituting memory to inhabitable and debatable contexts. And, indeed, we are systematically offered samples of the crew's discussions of the neighbors' interviews, as well as of the range of moods and feelings they generate (surprise, indignation, laughter, anguish, pain) .


1 76 Discourse 21.2 f 3

With the sequences of the neighbor who insistently identifies Carri' s family with the incongruous nickname, "the blonds," the film seizes, as was the case in Dorfman' s text, on the element of chance that exceeds historical rationale. For, ultimately, if the parents are taken away for political reasons, in the reconstitution of facts, they disappear because of a mistake that forces their identity on a neighbor. Unlike Dorfman' s text, however, the film does not rehearse ways of assimilating this chance element in a historical account, but uses it instead to keep its distance from historicizing discourses. Thus, although chance is given specific faces, these do not give it a historical meaning - whereas in one case there was a purposeful Flores, the neighbor who gives away the parents' location does so under pressure and out of fear, and seems either unaware of, or unconcerned by, the part she plays in their disappearance. In itself, the film's adoption of the family's "neighborhood" name as opposed, most notably, to their "war names" (evoked in one of the initial interviews) is a statement of the project of translation of the figure of the Carris from the past into the present. The disfiguring nickname "the blonds," which does not refer to the family's faces, describes them inaccurately, and offers no memory of their past; it is what is left when the identity of the parents and of the entire family is disengaged from both biographical and historical discourses. In its arbitrariness, "the blonds" figures the irreducibili ty of the parents' and the family's memory to history and biography.

At the end of the film, the entire crew, Carri included, leave the farmhouse wearing blond wigs, on music with the telling lyrics, "... I can see, I can tell, I can feel,/ Something has changed,/ For me this isn't strange,/ I will not/ Run away,/ I will not run away or escape,/ From my destiny. . . ." In a daringly stereotyped sequence, the actress is seen from the back, walking away from the camera on a winding road that had already been shown, empty, at the beginning of the film. Then the sequence begins again with the whole team walking down the same road, wearing their blond wigs, their backs to the audience. This impersonation of "the blonds" can be read as a statement of the film's success in con- structing a bearable figure of the past - of what is left of it - which can be taken on into the future and beyond the neighbors' gaze that first gave it a semblance. As the wigs suggest, this figure does not partake of strategies of identification, as it does not recur to prosopopoeia to articulate a historical discourse capable of mediat- ing human experience. Indeed, the figures in disguise turn their backs to the audience, and towards the announced in-the-country- with-friends sequence - of which we get black-and-white glimpses



here and there through the film, but a version in color after it ends, featuring the filmmaker and the actress horseback-riding. With these images, "left-overs" from the "main" film that mediate the fragile, often unsignifiable experience of the contingence of the day-to-day, we are once again reminded of what history, memory, and identity are made of.

Notes

1 1 would like to thank Dominic Rainsford and George Varsos for their comments on this paper.

2 Dorfman meets Beatriz Allende six months after her father's defeat, and she is surprised to see him alive: "She had sighted me there, she fervently assured me that the last time she looked back I was standing by Allende's side, waiting for the end exactly the defiant way I had imagined it, exactly the way it never happened" (57).

3 1 am not referring to Walter Benjamin's practice of reading history. If anything, Dorfman' s methods of "historical conciliation" is strikingly similar to the exegetical method designed to accord the Old and New Testaments, and which Erich Auerbach discusses thoroughly in his essay, "Figura."

4 In fact, history and chance are very often assimilated throughout Dorfman' s text, a vision of history as a playful, benign but unpredictable playmate (it "plays tricks" on him) taking over, here and there, that of a discourse demanding corpses, or of a "demented, faceless force."

5 Henceforth, all transcriptions and translations are mine. 6 The committee eventually came back on its decision, and agreed to

fund the film. It should be noted that the committee's reaction is not only legitimate with respect to a generation, but also represents the criticism made to works that focus on "the disappeared" to the detriment of their political projects and philosophies, thereby eluding the discussion of their pertinence to the present times.

7 This center gathers the data (genetic, chronological) with which to identify the corpses found in clandestine common graves, as well as those children who were taken from their sequestered parents and given for adoption, without their knowledge, often to the family of the very same abductors or torturers.

8 The film is in fact formally divided in three parts: what happens between the presentation of the producer and the heading, what happens between the heading and the end, and what happens after the end, which takes up the beginning before the heading. From the perspective of my argument, the sequence of the discussion of the committee's letter consti- tutes a crucial turning point. So, for the sake of expediency, I refer to the


1 78 Discourse 27.2 & 3

sequences preceding it as the first part, and those following it as the second part.

9 The Comisin Nacional Sobre la Desaparicin de Personas (National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) was created under the first democratic government after the dictatorship. It gathered information and testimonies and produced a report, the Nunca Ms , in 1984.

10 The quote is from an unspecified text by Rgine Robin. 11 The neighbors' interviews appear as a counterpart of the idealized

vision of the "mass" that is read out from one of Carri's texts at the beginning of the film. The passage quoted is one of the epigraphs of Roberto Carri's Isidro Velzquez: Formas prerevolucionarias de la violencia , and it pres- ents the people as an indifferent mass, akin to a school of fish, which preserves nevertheless a sense of its original unity. Under certain conditions, the latter is awakened, and the mass becomes people. In the interviews, the neighbors come through as neither "mass" nor "people."

Works Cited

The Ant Bully. Dir. John A. Davis. U.S.A. Warner Bros., 2006. Auerbach, Erich. "Figura." Scenes from the Drama of European Literature.

1959. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. 11-76.

Dorfman, Ariel. Heading South, Looking North. A Bilingual Journey. 1998. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Los Rubios. Dir. Albertina Carri. Prod. Barry Ellsworth. 2003. DVD. Argen- tina: Industria Argentina, 2005.


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Issue Table of ContentsDiscourse, Vol. 27, No. 2/3, Hostly and Unhostly Mediums (Spring & Fall 2005), pp. 1-230Front MatterTechnology, Aesthetics and Populism in "The Gospel According to Mark" [pp. 3-20]Sympathy For the Dead: (G)hosts, Hostilities and Mediums in Alejandro Amenbar's "The Others" and Postmortem Photography [pp. 21-40]Invitation to Politics: Juan Garca Ponce and the Promise of Availability [pp. 41-67]Messianic-City: Ruins, Refuge and Hospitality in Derrida [pp. 68-94]Sovereign (In)hospitality: Politics and the Staging of Equality in Revolutionary Mexico [pp. 95-123]Is Nothing Secret? [pp. 124-154]Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's "Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey" and Albertina Carri's film "The Blonds" [pp. 155-178]Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty [pp. 179-197]Piercing the Screen of Words: Reflections on the Political Poetics of Douglas Oliver [pp. 198-214]Review ArticleWhat About Schmitt? Translating Carl Schmitt's Theory of Sovereignty as Literary Concept [pp. 215-227]

Contributors [pp. 228-230]

Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North

Documents

Transcript of Unhostly Historical Discourses in Ariel Dorfman's Heading South, Looking North