Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile : Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film 2019914167, 9781498567893, 9781498567909

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Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile : Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film
 2019914167, 9781498567893, 9781498567909

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Introduction
1 Unsettling Nostalgia in Roberto Brodsky’s Últimos días de la historia
2 Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Chile
3 Unsettling the Archive
4 Postwar Prison Nostalgia
5 Nostalgia and Inner Exile in Almudena Grandes’s Spain
6 Detective Pursuits of an Ironic Nostalgic
Conclusion
References
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile

Unsettling Nostalgia in Spain and Chile Longing for Resistance in Literature and Film Lisa DiGiovanni

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number:2019914167 ISBN: 978-1-4985-6789-3 (cloth) ISBN: 978-1-4985-6790-9 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Prologue: Longing for Resistance

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Introduction: The Politics and Poetics of Nostalgia in Spain and Chile 1 2 3 4 5 6

Unsettling Nostalgia in Roberto Brodsky’s Últimos días de la historia Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Chile: Gender and Nostalgia in Calle Santa Fe by Carmen Castillo Unsettling the Archive: De monstruos y faldas by Carolina Astudillo Postwar Prison Nostalgia: La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón Nostalgia and Inner Exile in Almudena Grandes’s Spain Detective Pursuits of an Ironic Nostalgic: Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante

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53 77 97 117 139 165

Conclusion: Longing for Resistance

187

References

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

Throughout this book, I explore the concept of nostalgia in all of its complexity. As I attempt to thank all of the people who inspired and supported me throughout this project, my thoughts are tinged with nostalgia for particular moments, conversations, places, and friendships. First, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Gina Herrmann and Michael Lazzara. Thank you for your commitment, generosity, and direction. Gina mentored me throughout my Ph.D. program, while Michael introduced me to many places and people in Santiago whose insights helped me develop my understanding of contemporary Chile. Since then, I have returned, making new friendships and strengthening others. Thank you, Roberto Brodsky, Patricia Pérez Valdez, Adolfo Ramírez Sobarzo, Leith Passmore, Paz Ahumada, Marisol Bravo, Pía Barros, Resha Cardone, Boris Hau, and Juan Camilo Lorca. In Spain, my understanding of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship has evolved not only through conversations with scholars, but with my extended family who has offered their support and multiple perspectives during my travels to Madrid, Barcelona, and Galicia. Spain has become a second home to me, and for that I thank Emilio Vicente, Rosa Torras, Leopoldo Alvarez Sousa, Fina Pérez Sousa, Javier Barbi, Félix Echávarri, and Fani Yepes. El Archivo de la Guerra Civil Española in Salamanca and El Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile also played a role in the making of this book. Unsettling Nostalgia has its roots in the research that I developed at the University of Oregon in the Department of Romance Languages and later in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. My Ph.D. program provided me with special teaching and learning opportunities, as well as funding for research in Chile and Spain. I am especially grateful to Carlos Aguirre, Pedro García Caro and Cecilia Enjuto Rangel for offering critical vii

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feedback and encouragement in the early stages of this project. I am equally appreciative of their ongoing advice and friendship. Thank you as well to Juan Armando Epple, Leonardo García Pabón, Amrita Banerjee, Judith Raskin, Leah Middlebrook, Christina Lux, Amanda Powell, Emily Taylor, and Marsha Emerman for carefully reading earlier versions of my work or for offering guidance. Our community in Eugene was a wellspring of creativity and solidarity. Thank you Gabriela Martínez, Sayo Murcia, Anuncia Escala, Stephanie Wood, Meche Lu, Guadalupe Moreno, Mirtha Avalos, Lauretta De Renzo-Huter, Elena Espinoza, Roberto Galo Arroyo, and Adrea Bogle. For the inspiration for the subtitle Longing for Resistance, I thank Philip Scher. More recently, my colleagues at Keene State College have had a significant impact on my work. For spending time on my writing and for sharing theirs, I thank Emily Robins Sharpe, Jim Waller, Taneem Husain, Jamie Landau, Sara Hottinger, Ted White, Laurie Stuhlbarg, Jiwon Ahn, Jo Dery, Martin Roberts, Janet Albarado, Hank Knight, Laura Premack, Kirsti Sandy, Dana Smith, Rafael Ponce Cordero, Ashley Greene, Amber Davisson, Irina Leimbacher, Sasha Davis, Anne-Marie Mallon, Peggy Walsh, Micky New, Skye Stephenson and Chris Smith. Establishing a split contract between Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Modern Languages and Cultures at Keene State College has allowed me to push my research in new directions and for that I am grateful to all involved in making it happen, particularly Kirsti Sandy and Jim Waller. For institutional support at Keene State College, I would like to thank Andy Harris and the selection committees that granted me a course reassignment grant, summer seed funding, and multiple faculty development grants for the development of this monograph. I have also been inspired by undergraduate students at Keene State College, especially Jewel Bean, Jedidiah Crook, Sade Esquivel, Isaiah Lapierre, Maggie Rice, Valentina Pinzon-Mendez, Bridget Pierce, Susana Hassanein, and Katherine Briefs, as well as graduate students at Indiana State University including Kareema Maddox, Jackie Markle, Brook Elise Steppe, and Sol Angel Bernal-Tindera. At the University of Oregon, Jackie Sheean and Melissa Frost stand out in memory as some of the first outstanding students with whom I have had the pleasure to work. For our brief time together as students in Chile and for our conversations about Michelle Peña, I thank Alice MaCall. Over the last ten years, I have been invited to contribute to various publications and to work with scholars that have helped me sharpen my arguments. I thank David William Foster, Lorraine Ryan, Ana Corbalán, Sabastiaan Faber, Barbara Zecchi, María José Gámez Fuentes, Rebeca Maseda García, Jordana Blejmar, Natalia Fortuny, Laia Quílez Esteve, Maja Mikula, and Mark de Valk. Shorter versions of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in the following publications: Chasqui 40, no. 2 (2011): 108–124; Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 15–36. Several passages from

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chapter 5 appear in the essay “Teaching Narratives of Women’s Inner Exile in Spain and Chile” in The Iberian and Latin American Transatlantic Studies Reader, eds. Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Sebastian Faber, Pedro García Caro and Robert Patrick Newcomb (forthcoming 2019). All the material upon which I have expanded appears with their permission. I also drew some concepts from my essay “Return to Galicia: Nostalgia, Nation, and Gender in Manuel Rivas’s Spain” in Memory-Nostalgia-Melancholy: Re-imagining Home in a Time of Mobility, ed. Maja Mikula, Cambridge Scholars, 2017, 15–34 and “Visual Archives of Loss and Longing in Journal of Romance Studies 13, no. 3 (2013): 62–74. I thank the editors and readers of those previous publications as they helped me refine my arguments. For her enthusiasm for this monograph and her work shepherding me through the publication process, I thank Nicolette Amstutz, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Lexington Books. The meticulous and extremely perceptive anonymous peer-reviewers of this monograph also deserve a special acknowledgment. Maribel Rams, I cannot thank you enough for your constructive feedback. Also important is a note of appreciation to all of the authors and filmmakers in my study, particularly Roberto Brodsky, Carolina Astudillo and Patricio Guzmán who generously responded to my inquiries about their work. While I never had the opportunity to meet Svetlana Boym, I would like to acknowledge my admiration for her brilliant work on nostalgia since it has dramatically influenced this book. I wish to convey a very personal expression of gratitude for those relationships that predate graduate school and my professional career. I thank my parents, Jacquelyn Button and Sylvester DiGiovanni, and brother Sebastian DiGiovanni, for their generous support and for having the unselfish love and confidence in me to spread my wings at an early age. I hope to do the same for Belén and Sole. I owe sincere thanks to the Holladay family, especially Jim, Diana, Myakka, Kisa, and Tyrone, for inspiring my curiosity and love of the arts and humanities. Robert Neustadt has also been extremely significant on my path. His passion for literature and dedication to social justice has provided a model for teaching and research to which I can only aspire. Most importantly, I am forever grateful for my compañero, Carlos Vicente, and our daughters Sole y Belén. You are my tierra, sol and cielo. Thank you for your unfailing love, humor, patience, and encouragement, especially when I needed it most. We have made memories that I long to relive, but we have many more to make. I dedicate this book to you.

Prologue Longing for Resistance

On June 26, 2008 over a thousand Chileans gathered at La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago and the General Cemetery to pay homage to Salvador Allende on the centennial of his birth. The day was marked by a surge of nostalgic images, elegiac tributes, concerts, and documentary films dedicated to the former socialist leader whose life and political project had been discredited in the public sphere by the consolidators of the military dictatorship (1973–1990). The headlines of Santiago’s left-leaning newspapers and weekly journals read: “Honor y gloria al presidente heroico,” “En la Moneda, en el Centenario de su Nacimiento, Allende Exige Unidad,” and, “100 Años Allende Vive.” Students, workers, and veteran revolutionaries shouted this last slogan in front of the presidential palace. Through a loudspeaker, a middleaged man howled the rallying call, “¡Camarada Salvador Allende!” to which the crowd replied, “¡Presente! ¡Ahora! ¡Y Siempre!” 1 While this gathering seemed to bolster solidarity among many of Allende’s supporters, there were also deep-rooted disagreements between communists and socialists that divided the crowd. While some advocates of the Concertación government (a center-left coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists) headed by president Michelle Bachelet vindicated a continuity with Allende’s government, others disagreed claiming that if Allende had survived, he would have been profoundly disappointed with contemporary Chilean politics and the continuation of the neoliberal economic policies implemented by the Pinochet regime. Fortuitously, my research trip to Santiago coincided with this historic and nostalgic day on which Chileans engaged in a public, shared, albeit divided, commemoration of Allende’s birth. On June 26, I visited the place of Al1

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lende’s death at La Moneda and the following day I paid homage at his gravesite, constructed in 1990 after his family was allowed to exhume his remains from an unmarked grave in Viña del Mar and bring them to Santiago for public burial. Allende’s supporters adorned his grave with fresh red roses and carnations along with a long thin red cloth banner that read: “ALLENDE VIVE 100 AÑOS ALLENDE VIVE.” What struck me, though, was a large green wreath with the red and yellow flag of Catalunya at the base of the tomb. I saw the wreath as a profound symbolic offering that reflects a shared aspiration to build a progressive, egalitarian society, its loss, and a subsequent nostalgia for a program of social transformation that was obliterated. Historian Paul Preston underscores the points of contact between the Spanish Republican project of the 1930s and Chile’s Popular Unity project of the 1970s. “The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) arose in part out of the violent opposition of the privileged and their foreign allies to the reformist attempts of liberal Republican- Socialist governments to ameliorate the daily living conditions of the most wretched members of society. The parallels with Chile in the 1970s or Nicaragua in the 1980s hardly need emphasizing” (Preston 2006, 8). What is more, the extreme right sought to eliminate Basque, Catalan, and Galician nationalism in the Spanish Civil War. After the war, those Catalan anarchists, socialists, Communists, and separatists who did not go into exile suffered severe consequences of the Francoist dictatorship (1939–1975), which enforced strict policies of political and cultural repression, persecution, re-education, and socioeconomic discrimination. The donation of the wreath highlights the relationship between the Chileans, Catalans, and Spaniards who saw in Allende the dream of a democratic socialist project and the loss of that dream. Standing in front of the tomb, I wondered who might have left this symbolic wreath. I mused that it might have been the elderly Republican exile Victor Pey who arrived in Valparaíso, Chile along with 2,100 other Republicans on September 3, 1939, on the ship called the Winnipeg. The previous evening, I had seen Pey featured in the documentary Buscando a Allende (2008) by the Argentine director Carlos Pronzato. In the film, Pronzato embarks on a nostalgic journey “in search of Allende.” He travels to his birthplace in Valparaíso and interviews his childhood friends, former supporters, leftist militants, journalists, and admirers. To me, the most intriguing interview was with Victor Pey, who described in a brief but colorful vignette his extraordinary friendship with Salvador Allende, who in 1939 was the minister of health who lobbied to aid Spanish Republican refugees. 2 Fascinated by this story, I talked to the film director, who generously gave me Pey’s phone number and informed me that he was still living in Santiago. Over the following month, I attempted to track him down, writing him emails and leaving him phone messages, but to no avail. I searched the

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internet, collecting threads and scraps of Pey’s story, mulling them over and imagining the questions I wanted to ask him. The information I gathered revealed that Pey was born in 1915 and studied engineering, specializing in metallurgy, an essential industry for the production of weapons. During the war, Pey united with the anarcho-syndicalist labor union the CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo) and became part of the Durruti Column consisting of approximately 6,000 anarchist fighters. When Barcelona fell to Franco’s fascist troops on January 26, 1939, Pey escaped to Lyon, France with his mother and sister. Shortly thereafter, he discovered that Pablo Neruda was in Paris organizing the departure of the Winnipeg and was selecting Republican political exiles that would accompany him on the ship headed to Chile in September. Pey planned a meeting with the Chilean poet and soon secured a space on the old French cargo ship with his family. By the time the Pey family had boarded the Winnipeg, Pedro Aguirre Cerda, a progressive teacher and politician of the left-wing Radical Party, had recently won the Chilean presidential elections with the coalition of the Chilean Popular Front (1936–1941). Like the Spanish Popular Front, Chile’s left-wing alliance united Socialists and Communists, as well as organizations such as the feminist Movimiento Pro-Emancipación de las Mujeres de Chile, the trade union Confederación de Trabajadores de Chile and the united Mapuche movement known as the Frente Único Araucano. Significantly, the Chilean Frente Popular was deeply impacted by the Spanish Civil War as Fabián Almonacid Zapata argues in “Españoles en Chile: reacciones de la colectividad frente a la República, Guerra Civil y Franquismo (1931–1940).” While supporters of the Chilean Popular Front saw in Spain the rise of a new egalitarian society, right-wing reactionaries saw the breakdown of a nation. Consequently, the Spanish Republican exiles that arrived at the port of Valparaíso in September 1939 were received with solidarity by some and hostility by others. After Victor Pey’s arrival in Chile, he established a friendship with Salvador Allende. In the 1940s and 1950s, Pey ran an engineering firm involved in refining Chile’s ports then later became involved in the newspaper El Clarín. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the paper thrived until Pinochet confiscated it in 1973, coincidentally only a short time after Pey had purchased the paper. The regime ordered Pey to report to authorities in the days after the coup, but he soon fled the country in fear of detainment. In an almost novelesque turn of events, Pey returned to Spain where Franco was nearing his death. Pinochet’s soldiers destroyed El Clarín, its printing presses and all of the newspaper’s documentation. Pey’s financial losses (the business, the buildings, and the new printing presses) totaled approximately $1.3 million, while his personal losses were incalculable and beyond repair. Upon his return to Chile during the transition to democracy in 1990, Pey brought a legal case against the Chilean government for financial compensation for the

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newspaper. Pey’s partner in the effort to recover El Clarín was lawyer Joan Garcés (b. 1944), the Valencian political adviser to Allende who was also driven out of Chile and back to Spain after the coup. During the Pinochet years, it was Garcés who worked with Chileans exiles in Spain and later with the Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón to develop a groundbreaking legal case that culminated in the arrest of Pinochet in London in 1998. Pey’s effort to demand justice in Chile is part of a larger socio-political scenario involving various Spanish and Chilean social actors seeking to publicly denounce both Pinochet’s and Franco’s human rights violations. Pey’s struggle for compensation lasted nearly twenty years and ended in an unjust dismissal of his legal case. Some critics, such as John Dinges, have suggested that the Pey case exemplifies the legacy of the dictatorship and the remaining lack of ideological diversity and journalistic freedom in the Chilean printed press. From my perspective, Pey’s story evokes the transatlantic connections that I have sought to draw out in my research on contemporary Spanish and Chilean cultural production. The recorded version of Pey’s story also reveals the unsettling voids in the historical record that ignore, for example, the experiences of women and children. Absent are the stories of solidarity and subsequent trauma related to loss and dispossession experienced by Pey’s mother and sister. Still today, so many issues seem unexplored. As I thought through issues of memory, nostalgia, and narrative in the context of Spain and Chile, I considered how an interview with Pey and his family could shed light on many of my inquiries. How did they remember the Second Spanish Republic and the Spanish Civil War? What did their journey on the Winnipeg mean to them? In what way were the struggles of men and women different? Did they nostalgically long to return to Spain or did they embrace a new life in Chile? What did the Popular Unity government mean to them in the early 1970s? How has their political and national identity transformed over the years? Was their return to Spain after the 1973 military coup a homecoming or yet another defeat? Now, in the wake of the regimes, did they feel nostalgia for the cultural and political milieu that characterized the brief periods of the Second Spanish Republic and the Popular Unity government? And finally, did they leave the wreath adorned with the Catalan flag at the base of Salvador Allende’s tomb? By the end of my journey, I had begun to lose hope in a possible encounter with Pey until I went to a book presentation in Santiago and by chance, he and his daughter sat right in front of me. Full of hope, I approached them, but he mistook me for someone else and embraced me. After I awkwardly asked him if he had received my messages, he realized his error and kindly told me that he would get back to me, which never happened. The interview that I had envisioned lingers, forever suspended. My questions remain unanswered, and my longing to listen to their stories remains unfulfilled. Victor Pey died on October 5, 2018, at the age of 103.

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I begin with this story because it sets the stage to explore the historical, affective, and thematic underpinnings of this book. The Pey family’s defense of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War and their support of Chile’s Popular Unity government underscores the interconnectedness between Chile’s and Spain’s revolutionary projects calling for more profound forms of social and economic justice. This story also illustrates the rightwing military backlash against such projects, and finally, current debates concerning the legacies of the military regimes and the politics of memory. A range of theoretical approaches could be used to analyze each of these interrelated topics, but at the heart of this book is the question of nostalgia. How is nostalgia experienced and how it is conveyed in literature and film? Since I have often been asked about the origins of this book and the inspiration behind these questions, it is fitting to offer a few words based on my own experience. For me, the attempt to understand nostalgia and its allure has been both personal and political. On the one hand, my interest in stories of resistance to fascist forms of government and culture unveils my own “displaced nostalgia,” which, according to sociologist Janelle Wilson, is a type of nostalgia for times and experiences unknown to the nostalgic subject. “Nostalgia for bygone times does not require having actually experienced those times” (Wilson 2005, 99). Media, Wilson suggests, can in fact, create and sustain nostalgia. Reading narratives of 1936 and 1968 can make the current moment seem pale in comparison. If Generation X includes those born between 1965 and 1981, then that diffuse label used in many contexts, including the United States, Spain, and Chile, shades my identity. The meaning of the classification is open to debate, but most would agree that “Gen X” generally denotes a cohort that came of age during the rise of neoliberal capitalism, ultra-consumerism, accelerated environmental destruction, ongoing economic and gender inequality, impunity and unabashed individualism. As I explain later, responses to such conditions range widely, among them indifference, skepticism about new horizons, and conversely a kind of wideeyed nostalgia. For me, it is unsurprising that Spain’s and Chile’s cultural production about the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Unity has captured the imagination of so many who did not experience them directly. I am referring to the appeal of representations of periods of political and social mobilization and the enthusiasm to improve the living conditions of women, minorities and the working classes through the implementation of radical educational, healthcare, and agrarian reform. Such impassioned histories captivate, stir the imagination and, for many, provoke an interest to dig beneath the surface. While the exposure to films, novels, and documentaries that convey nostalgia for revolutionary periods has played a role in the development of this research, that is only part of the story. To this must be added the instrumental role of my relationships with friends and family who experienced first-hand

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twentieth-century political upheaval in Spain, Chile, and the United States in the 1930s and 1960s and responded to that upheaval in vastly different ways. The relationships that I have forged have shaped my perspective of the compelling and competing histories of the Chilean Popular Unity and the Spanish Civil War. My partner’s family, which I call my own, has been molded by both the experience of immigration (linking Galicia, Catalunya, the Dominican Republic, and Argentina) and an enduring rootedness in the many political realities of Spain. Listening to their conflicting attitudes on the meanings of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship has inevitably made me acutely aware of the complexities of memory and its relationship to political views in the present. After becoming mindful of my own nostalgic response to romanticized, often simplistic, portrayals of the revolutionary epochs of the 1930s and 1960s, I began to wonder what nostalgia erases, conceals, or distorts. Unsettling Nostalgia investigates how contemporary writers and filmmakers have rendered visible the arduous process of coming to terms not only with the effects of 20th-century dictatorial violence in Spain and Chile but also the loss of leftist collectivities that characterized the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the Chilean Popular Unity (1970–1973). Through the analysis of a small but illustrative collection of contemporary novels and films, this book describes how nostalgia imbues representations of revolutionary struggle and clandestine resistance to the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) and the Pinochet regime (1973–1989). By reaching beyond reductive definitions that limit nostalgia to a foggy backward gaze precipitated by a conservative desire to defend traditional power hierarchies, I explore the complexity of a critically conscious type of longing and form of transmission that I term “unsettling nostalgia.” It is not that the authors and filmmakers in this study wish to return to the context of war and dictatorship. Instead, they develop plotlines and characters that at once allow them to reclaim past struggles and to express a profound dissatisfaction with ongoing impunity, structural gender and class inequality and the deterioration of human relations through the forces of capitalism. For Chile, I examine the novels Últimos días de la historia (2001) by Roberto Brodsky and Estrella distante (1996) by Roberto Bolaño and the documentary film Calle Santa Fe (2008) by Carmen Castillo. For Spain, I analyze the documentary De monstruos y faldas (2008) by Carolina Astudillo and the novels La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacón and two novels by Almudena Grandes, El corazón helado (2007) and El lector de Julio Verne (2012). In previous publications, I have used the lens of unsettling nostalgia to analyze the documentary Mi vida con Carlos (2010) by the Chilean filmmaker Germán Berger Hertz and the novel El lápiz del carpintero (1998) by the Galician writer Manuel Rivas. In the interest of bringing fresh material to this book, those essays will remain stand-alone articles but recommended for

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further reading. The former appears in the Journal of Romance Studies (2013) and the latter was published in the book Memory-Nostalgia-Melancholy: Re-imagining Home in a Time of Mobility (2017). By calling attention to the parallels between nostalgic modes that respond to and “resist” the violent hijacking of the Second Republic and the Allende government, this book traces an evocative continuity between Spain and Chile that goes beyond the initial work that links authoritarian regimes and practices of political, cultural, and gendered repression. The writers and filmmakers that I study reclaim a cultural continuity that breaks with the regimes’ nationalist and patriarchal narratives through the construction of stories of dissent. They depict the tremendous losses suffered by women and men of the resistance and commemorate the emotional bonds that they forged through shared political and social values. The vindication of solidarity in these novels and films implicitly or explicitly contrasts the disconnection, apathy, and individualism of the neoliberal post-revolutionary present with the political mobilization and collectivism of yesteryear. Nostalgia thus conveys not only a message about the past, but a powerful message about the disenchantment widely felt in the present. At the same time, this selection of works from 1996–2012 excavates memories of political conflict, shortcomings, ambivalences, and contradictions among the anti-Franco and anti-Pinochet resistance. Some of the novels and films describe, for instance, an imperfect relationship between theory and practice when it came to gender hierarchies. While equality between men and women seemed to be one of the promises of these revolutionary periods, these works show that many Spaniards and Chileans failed to embrace new kinds of modern relationships based on a shared commitment to challenging gender norms. Heterosexual men often marginalized women and the nongender conforming within the opposition while they maintained their normative power as leaders. Through the representation of such stories, the novels and films in this study raise questions involving ingrained power hierarchies, thereby prompting us to gain a more complex understanding of the past. The delicate and often painful articulation of such memories is equally important. In this way, Unsettling Nostalgia redefines nostalgia by showing that it may at once idealize people, places, and times, and simultaneously critique their many blemishes. If nostalgia is an emotional response to the lingering sense of loss in the aftermath of violence, it is also a tool. By provoking a nuanced engagement with the past and eliciting a reflection on the ongoing quest for justice and belonging, nostalgic representation becomes a means to create community and link generations. History takes on new life in literary and cinematic reconstructions and these, in turn, contribute to the construction of identity. This study frames nostalgia as a trans-generational post-revolutionary act of memory in public culture that may inspire new affiliative claims and subvert

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the regimes’ triumphalism while remaining cautious of monologic idealizations. Nostalgia resonates most powerfully not in reductive idealizations of resistance fighters, but rather in complex portraits of mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons whose stories bring out the complexities of historical processes while calling into question the gendered assumptions that shape them. By paying attention to the gendered dimensions of political resistance in film and narrative fiction, we complicate appeals to a homogeneous memory of the anti-Franco or anti-Pinochet resistance and, by extension, contribute to the interdisciplinary dialogue among the humanities and social sciences on the meanings of revolution and dictatorship in post-dictatorial Spain and Chile. To frame the case studies, I offer an introductory chapter that provides a historical contextualization and theoretical foundation. It shows how twentieth-century histories of Spain and Chile parallel each other on many levels. Progressive Chilean writers and politicians stood in solidarity with Spanish anti-fascist fighters during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and offered refuge to Republican exiles during the subsequent military regime of Francisco Franco (1939–1975). After the death of Franco, Spain became a site of Chilean exile in the wake of the military coup and the ensuing dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989). From the post-dictatorial 1990s to the present, both nation-states have struggled to deal with the legacies of militarized masculinity, torture, disappearance, and neoliberal economic and political practices. Writers, filmmakers, and victims’ organizations have sought to contest the regimes’ discourses and give voice to marginalized groups. The introduction also provides a rationale for the selection of genres. Most critics consider fictional films and narratives as sites for nostalgia while they ignore the documentary film. Challenging the assumption that documentary is an uncreative and “objective” form, I expose the constructed nature of the non-fiction genre, created through narrative voiceover, interviews, and dramatic reconstruction. Viewing nostalgic fictional narrative alongside documentary film engenders a reflection on the differences and similarities between the often-unrecognized strategies that communicate nostalgic longing. In light of this book’s rationale for the comparison of Chile and Spain, one could argue that the inclusion of Argentina and Uruguay in this study would not only be relevant, but necessary given the similarities between sociopolitical patterns and responses to those patterns. It is for that reason that previous transatlantic approaches to human rights violations and memory have compared Spain and Argentina. Notable examples include Radical Justice: Spain and the Southern Cone Beyond Market and State (2011) by Luis Martín Cabrera; Post-Authoritarian Cultures: Spain and Latin America’s Southern Cone (2008) by Luis Martín-Estudillo; and “De aquí a allá, de ayer a hoy: posmemoria y cine documental en la España y Argentina

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contemporáneas” (2013) by Laia Quílez. As I look forward, I plan to expand my reach, but more importantly, I hope that readers of this comparison benefit not only from the detailed examinations of the works that I have selected but also from the idea of unsettling nostalgia to analyze works in other contexts and comparisons including Argentina and Uruguay. My approach is grounded in Memory Studies, Feminist Studies, Genocide Studies, Literary Criticism, and Film Studies. These fields have offered core insights that have allowed me to engage in original ways with the representation of both political repression and nostalgia. My analysis draws primarily from the theoretical work of Elizabeth Jelin, Marianne Hirsch, Jo Labanyi, Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, and Cynthia Enloe. Of particular importance is Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, a groundbreaking text that coined the terms “reflective nostalgia” and “restorative nostalgia.” Boym maintains that nostalgia can be a “reflective” examination of the past or a “restorative” flat idealization. I move beyond Boym’s framework to illustrate how these nostalgic forms are not mutually exclusive. Overtly idealizing “restorative” perceptions of the past that manifest a schematized rhetoric may overlap with “reflective” nostalgic open-endedness and ideological nuance. I expand on Boym’s lexicon to conceptualize hybrid and “unsettling” forms of nostalgia, showing that contrasting types of longing can shift, collide, and meld together in unexpected ways. These works illustrate the need for an innovative paradigm of analysis, one that also addresses the intersections of identity (gender, sexuality, class, race, nation, age) in relation to memory and nostalgia. With its focus on loss, recollection, and redress and how these relate to identity construction and representation, Unsettling Nostalgia contributes to the fields of Latin American Studies, Transatlantic Studies, Memory Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, Film Studies, and Genocide Studies. In the last decade, many critics have explored how film and narrative fiction perform memory work and how texts insert themselves into the ongoing debates about the legacies of the military regimes. What sets this book apart is its interpretive lens focused on the complexities of nostalgia and its intersections particularly with gender and politics in contemporary literature and film. By comparing new works by both emerging and well-known authors and filmmakers within a transnational framework, this book generates insights that would not be possible if these areas were investigated separately. As a timely reflection on the most current memory struggles, Unsettling Nostalgia aims to re-imagine the relationship between memory and identity, exploring how individuals draw inspiration from the past as they confront the social and political remains of the dictatorships in the present.

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NOTES 1. For more on the event see the article “What Would Allende Say?” in online journal n+1, July 27, 2008, Luke Epplin, http://www.nplusonemag.com/what-would-allende-say. 2. Victor Pey also appears in the documentary film Salvador Allende (2004) by Patricio Guzmán. For more information on Pey, see “The Curious Case of Victor Pey” by John Dinges.

Introduction The Politics and Poetics of Nostalgia in Spain and Chile

NOSTALGIA: UNRAVELING THE CONCEPT How can we define nostalgia? Why and how does it emerge? What does nostalgia do? Can we have nostalgia for something we have not experienced ourselves? How do literature and film convey nostalgia? These questions have vexed psychologists, sociologists, historians, and literary and film critics alike. The term “nostalgia” has meant various things at different times. Contemporary definitions coincide in the idea that nostalgia is an emotional state and a perception of the past that reflects notions of social and historical discontinuity. Underpinning nostalgic remembrance is a perceived contrast between an unappealing current moment and an attractive yesteryear. Such perceptions serve as a kind of remedy for an individual or collective disillusionment in the present. For Stuart Tannock, “The nostalgic subject turns to the past to find/construct sources of identity, agency, or community, that are felt to be lacking, blocked, subverted, or threatened in the present” (Tannock 1995, 454). As such, nostalgia may reveal more about the tenor of the present than the concrete realities of the past (Davis 1979, 15–16). The triggers for nostalgia are not merely the sights, sounds, and smells that bring back memories of the “good old days,” but political, economic, and cultural dissatisfactions with the present. Through nostalgic reminiscence, we reanimate the past, and in turn, the past renews us. In the words of Svetlana Boym, “Social utopias of artistic imagination acquire a second life of recycled dreams and history lessons” (Boym 2010, 81). Nostalgia’s seventeenth-century definition of a longing for a lost home is too narrow. Janelle Wilson suggests, “Nostalgia for bygone times does not 11

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require having actually experienced those times” (Wilson 2005, 99). Media can, in fact, create and sustain nostalgia. Objects like black and white photographs, vintage clothing, and classic cars also inspire nostalgia for times and places that appear out of reach. Furthermore, nostalgia is not only a longing for a distant time and the places and objects that symbolize it but also a longing for the people who inhabited that past (Boym 2001, ix). In Latin America and beyond, figures like Che Guevara have not only become revolutionary icons but also drivers of an entire nostalgia market. Where critics do not agree is whether or not nostalgia can be critical and nuanced, or if it is essentially a debilitating form of escapism. In the book The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (1989), David Lowenthal claims that nostalgia “tells it like it like it wasn’t” (18). He summarizes some scathing critiques of nostalgia: “the victim of nostalgia is worse than a reactionary; he is an incurable sentimentalist. Afraid of the future, he is also afraid to face the truth about the past. Nostalgists are not merely wrong; they are warped. Their temperamental aversion to the rough and tumble, the complexity and turmoil of modern life betrays an emotional inability to engage with reality” (Lowenthal 1989, 20). The perception that nostalgia inhibits the subject from living in the present has prompted many critics to relate nostalgia with melancholia, a subjective distress, and sorrow that arises from loss. For many, to be nostalgic is merely to dwell on the past, or to embrace the kitschy culture of curiosities from yesteryear. Nostalgia’s detractors not only identify it with regression, paralysis, and melancholia, they often recognize it as a condition of the political right-wing. Lowenthal persuasively argues, however, that, “the view of nostalgia as a self-serving, chauvinist, right-wing version of the past foisted by the privileged and propertied likewise neglects half the facts. The left no less than the right espouses nostalgia” (28). Lowenthal recognizes that the reductive lens of nostalgia exists on both sides of the political spectrum, but he stops short of identifying different types of nostalgia. Two foundational books that challenge common assumptions about nostalgia are Yearning for Yesterday (1979) by American sociologist Fred Davis and The Future of Nostalgia (2001) by Russian-American cultural critic Svetlana Boym. The pioneering work by Davis lays the foundation for “ascending orders” of nostalgia in both personal and collective memory. The first order he describes as “simple nostalgia,” or the “subjective state that harbors the largely unexamined belief that things were better (more beautiful) (healthier) (happier) (more civilized) (more exciting) then than now.” (Davis 1979, 18). This “unabashed assertion of the beautiful past and the unattractive present” contrasts with the second-order of nostalgia, which Davis terms “reflexive nostalgia,” or a hesitant longing that “contemplates the apparent contradictions of remembered experience and historical judgment” (Davis 1979, 22). Reflection “adds dimension to and enriches the simple

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nostalgic reaction, making of it in its reflexivity a more complex human activity that can better comprehend ourselves and our pasts” (Davis 1979, 24). Over two decades later, Boym breathed new life into the debate in The Future of Nostalgia, conceptualizing the critical potential of “reflective nostalgia” in contrast to the “restorative” type. Whereas Davis mostly focuses on the 1970s nostalgia wave that emerged in the United States, Boym’s point of departure is the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the nostalgic reinterpretations of political revolution in its wake. The author’s reach is wide, including reflections on objects ranging from architectural structures and films to legends and anecdotes. For Boym, “restorative nostalgia” is essentially a prideful history without any shame, “an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure” (Boym 2001, xiv). It unconsciously ignores memory gaps and assumes shared political beliefs and values. It upholds the idea of absolute truth that exists “at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots—the return to origins and the conspiracy” (Boym 2001, xviii). Boym associates right-wing politics with a longing for “traditional” family values and roles, which serve as euphemisms for the uncritical adherence to essentialist ideologies and stereotyped identities. Boym also recognizes that despite nostalgia’s apparent absence from the revolutionary lexicon, Marx himself drew from the restorative nostalgic mode through an “attachment to ‘primitive communism’ before capitalist exploitation, and to the heroes of the past, Spartacus and Robin Hood” (Boym 2001, 59). She observes the use of restorative nostalgia as a galvanizing force to encourage revolutionary support; however, she also identifies an alternative nostalgic mode that she links to progressive politics. “Reflective” nostalgia casts aspersions on national myths and the “reestablishment of stasis”: “The focus here is not on recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on history and passage of time” (Boym 2011, 49). Like Davis, Boym objects to critics who assert that there is an inherent contradiction between affective longing and critical thinking. As Historian Patrick Hutton explains, Boym shows how reflective nostalgia has become “a way to revisit and assess the meaning of the dreamwork that lay behind the projects of oppositional movements during the Soviet era” (Hutton 2013, 5). The writings of Walter Benjamin and Fredric Jameson also stand out in the bibliography on nostalgia. In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” Jameson frames the ‘nostalgia mode’ as ‘an alarming and pathological symptom of a [consumer capitalist] society that has become incapable of dealing with time and history’ (Jameson 1985b, 117). Taking as examples glossy Hollywood films like American Graffiti (1973) that sanitize images of the past to deliver a “feel-good” escape, Jameson warns against uncritical remi-

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niscence based on traditional stereotypes. These insights also inform his essay “Nostalgia for the Present” in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson 1990). In an earlier article, however, Jameson claims that nostalgia can be a source of inspiration for struggle against status quo beliefs to the extent that it embraces a historicizing perspective (Jameson 1969). In “Walter Benjamin, or nostalgia,” he evokes Benjamin’s notion of the “dustbin of history” to uphold the act of salvaging still relevant expressions of consciousness like those associated with Modernism. As Susannah Radstone suggests, “While Benjamin’s writings on the aura and lost modes of storytelling have been construed as nostalgic for past ways of life, Jameson’s decrying of postmodern nostalgia sits beside his own nostalgia, not least for older modes of nostalgia (Radstone 2010, 188). UNSETTLING NOSTALGIA The critics that I have cited are well known, but countless others have grappled with the meaning of nostalgia. It is no longer innovative to argue that nostalgia is much more than the uncritical idealization usually identified with it. Nevertheless, the topic of nostalgia is far from exhausted. This book challenges readers to broaden their perception by asking how nostalgia might emerge as an unsettling way of regarding the past as well as a thoughtprovoking form of representation in the aftermath of collective trauma. This book also reframes nostalgia by asking how the remembering subject’s understanding of categories of identity and hierarchies of power shape longing. Nostalgic return is framed here as a voyage in memory that is intersected by the remembering subject’s understanding of power. To long for certain places and milieus involves perceptions of times embedded in political struggles to either uphold or upend unequal power relations. In other words, when it comes to nostalgia, gender matters, as do other categories of identity. Questions involving gender, sexuality, and class, among others, permeate the nostalgically imagined past. Such longing also bespeaks the remembering subject’s sense of dissatisfaction with the social conditions of their own present. (DiGiovanni 16, 2017). Central to this book is a feminist perspective that emphasizes the significance of the intersectional makeup of identities and the many ways in which gender, class, sexuality, and political affiliation work to constitute individual and collective experiences and nostalgic memories of them. 1 If feminist research probes the socially constructed nature of identity, and memory studies looks into the relationship between remembrance and identity, then it is pertinent to consider them in tandem to reach a deeper understanding of nostalgia. Hegemonic and anti-hegemonic cultural narratives shape the perspectives of authors and filmmakers and they, in turn, produce films and

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novels that play a role in the formation of contemporary identities and social movements. As Nick Hodgin maintains in his book on nostalgia in German cinema, if one accepts that identity is created, one can begin to investigate how culture participates in its construction (Hodgin 2011, 3–4). To capture the complexity of nostalgic longing and its transmission, I propose the concept of unsettling nostalgia (la nostalgia inquietante). While this book draws from Boym’s conceptualization of “reflective” and “restorative” nostalgia, it also moves beyond the binary oppositional relationship between these forms. The introduction and case studies bring out the multiple manifestations of nostalgia, including the coexistence and tensions between a reductive “restorative” mode and the more critical and nuanced “reflective” mode. Given that a more precise lexicon allows for a better understanding of the dimensions of nostalgia, I define the meaning and scope of unsettling nostalgia through detailed examinations of literature and film and show how contrasting types of longing can morph and mesh in unexpected ways. Whereas Boym holds that reflective nostalgia is characterized by playful irony and humor and contrasts with melancholic desire, I contend that melancholia can impinge on both reflective and restorative nostalgia. This book thus refutes the critique of nostalgia as an unproductive rosy idealization of better personal or national pasts, and melancholia as a destructive form of memory caused by an unmourned loss and resulting inevitably in paralysis. I agree with Christian Gundermann, who has expanded the definition of melancholy by framing it as a form of resistance to closure and detachment. With a focus on memories of leftist militancies of the 1960s and 1970s in Argentina, his book Actos melancólicos (2008) argues that melancholia can become a collective force to inspire action rather than an individualistic form of immobilizing yearning. The authors and filmmakers whose work I examine compel us to continue to question and expand previous frameworks. The overlapping and unpredictable combinations of reflective and restorative nostalgia, which at times also include irony and melancholia, become “unsettling nostalgia.” The term implies that the memory maker’s gaze back at once idealizes the past and disquiets the reader/viewership by showing its complexity through the recollection of uncomfortable memories that generate productive confrontations with the past. Unsettling nostalgic novels and films thus contribute to a deeper understanding of the emotional legacies of political struggles and how stories of resistance might be meaningful and even mobilizing today. Unsettling nostalgia is recognizable in characterization, plot, and structure. Whereas reductive nostalgic novels and films star heroic, mythical, stereotypical, and one-dimensional characters, unsettling nostalgic works feature polychromatic, flawed, curious, ambiguous, and contradictory figures. Plot structures incorporate historical detail not to add a sheen of authenticity to the fictional world of the text, but to question it. They tend to eschew

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formulaic, melodramatic or overtly sentimental tropes and conclusions, presenting instead unconventional and paradoxical turns and endings. Unsettling nostalgic narratives employ tangential plotlines and metafictional strategies to show an open attitude towards the past. Narrative self-consciousness permits a space to muse on ambivalences of longing and the existence of contradictions, limitations, and inconsistencies in memory. The depthless restorative structure, by contrast, can be characterized by a flowing aesthetic, which seeks to tie experiences of the past into lacquered narratives and settling conclusions. The term “unsettling nostalgia” functions both as a modified noun and a verb. As a noun, unsettling nostalgia is an emotionally-charged view of the past that is also a tool to build critical consciousness, community, and cultures of memory. It is an affective and probing form of transmission that fissures justificatory narratives of hierarchical power. As a verb, “unsettling nostalgia” has two meanings. To “unsettle” nostalgia is to destabilize dismissive notions of nostalgia by moving beyond its standard definition as a flat or false view of a distant era. As an action, the term can also describe the disruption of a reactionary form of nostalgia for an imagined past grandeur. To “unsettle” nostalgia is to make visible competing ways of remembering. It is to transmit a yearning that pushes against the conservative nostalgic discourses that have fueled hardline vindications of unequal power structures. The concept of unsettling nostalgia gives readers a new lens for interpretation. While this book focuses specifically on nostalgic responses to social upheaval in Spain and Chile, it is my hope that Unsettling Nostalgia’s larger claims bring insight to readers considering other historical contexts as well. THE COMPELLING COMPARISON OF SPAIN AND CHILE This book develops the concept of unsettling nostalgia to understand how authors and filmmakers represent memories of the pre-dictatorial pasts in Spain and Chile, as well as the anti-fascist resistance to the military regimes of Francisco Franco (1939–1975) and Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Unsettling nostalgia is a multigenerational response to dictatorial rule and a tool for survivors and their children to mitigate the sense of loss in the wake of rupture and displacement. But why is the comparison between Spain and Chile so compelling? Nostalgia resonates within many historical, cultural, and geographical contexts, but the rise of nostalgia culture in the context of contemporary Spain and Chile is striking for its relationship to political struggles for intersecting forms of social justice. While previous transatlantic approaches to human rights violations and memory have compared the case of Spain with others in the Southern Cone, the links between nostalgia and

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identity as represented in post-dictatorial literature and film have not been teased out in a transatlantic feminist framework. Nostalgic depictions of oppositional voices in the wake of authoritarian rule in Spain and Chile defy the military regimes’ present-day apologists who defend the attempt to extinguish leftist political goals and identities through militarized methods of control. Against the post-dictatorial backdrop of neoliberal capitalism, economic austerity, and widespread political apathy, nostalgia unfolds in films and novels about the Second Spanish Republic (1931–1939) and the Chilean Popular Unity (1970–1973), revealing a longing for a time of political awakening and solidarity. Nostalgic cultural production seeks to remind the public that the political uprisings of 1930s Spain and 1960s Chile had their roots in a rejection of a long history of socioeconomic repression of historically marginalized groups. Contemporary authors and filmmakers find in the past a range of political movements that emerged and attracted supporters that transcended national boundaries. Revolutionary characters, objects, and settings embody a nostalgia for a time of bonding and commitment to anti-fascist values. They suggest that while dreams for equality were often rife with contradictions involving ingrained sexism and racism within the left, countless women and men felt that what they were experiencing was seismic progressive change. While the recent surge of nostalgia is visible in the abundance and popularity of historical novels, feature films, and documentaries, it is also true that nostalgia previously shaped depictions of the Second Republic after the Spanish Civil War in 1939, as well as portrayals of the Chilean Popular Unity after the military coup in 1973. Unsettling nostalgic perceptions of the past emerged as a response to the ravages of war, forced migration, and inner exile that these military backlashes produced. That is to say, nostalgia is not an unknown phenomenon in these contexts, but that it has changed over time. For Spanish and Chilean exiles, nostalgia surfaced as a mournful defense mechanism and an empowering tool in the remaking of solidarity and the maintenance of hope for a future return after the military takeovers. For those who remained, the regimes’ strategy to produce fear and distrust contributed to the unraveling of countless bonds and collective dreams. Others, however, sustained relationships and shared aspirations through nostalgic remembrance even when public mourning was prohibited. As much as the regimes sought to fracture the opposition and manipulate history by demonizing the defeated, they could not entirely erase positive memories of the Second Republic in Spain and the Popular Unity in Chile. Today, nostalgic memories of the political awakening associated with those periods have become a prominent part of a cultural landscape shaped by a multigenerational population seeking to distance themselves from the dictatorial past and the patriarchal and capitalist values that have remained in their wake. Within those socio-political contexts, writers and filmmakers in

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Spain and Chile have produced stories of longing for a pre-dictatorial period, as well as for a time of resistance during the regimes. Their protagonists are proponents of the Second Republic and the Popular Unity who conceived of a social agenda that aimed to dismantle exploitative power structures and patriarchal forms of culture. Through narrative and cinematic strategies, the authors and filmmakers foreground real and fictional figures that participated in the reshaping of society, for instance, by pushing for reforms that granted women the right to vote, divorce, and hold positions of political power. Their storylines reveal that such changes did not result in an overnight shift in sexist and classist ideologies and that reformers often faced backlash from groups hostile to social transformation. Military elites figure prominently in their narratives and represent an oppressive model of manhood that required the capacity for violence and fanaticism for the patriarchal nation. Negative characterizations of militarized figures function as a counterpoint to the idealized characterizations of the opposition. Authors and filmmakers often place such narratives within larger stories involving aging survivors who recollect their struggles to their younger interlocutors. If the main plotline is set in the present, it serves to set the stage for a second narrative situated in the past that may be retrieved only through the fragmented process of remembrance, archival research, and oral history. The frame story thus leads readers back to smaller stories, each conveying a sense of loss and nostalgia. The novel O lapis do carpinteiro (1998) (El lápiz del carpintero) by Manuel Rivas exemplifies these literary strategies. The narrative’s point of departure is around 1998 when a Galician journalist receives an assignment to interview an aging former doctor and political activist who was imprisoned for his defense of the Second Republic. The journalist’s political disenchantment and ignorance of the Spanish Civil War set up what becomes the development of his own critical consciousness through attentive listening (DiGiovanni 2017, 19). The pretext of the imminent death of a Republican survivor gives way to a journey in time and a transgenerational dialogue that contextualizes political persecution and commemorates the resilience of the defeated Republicans. The author’s characterizations show how nostalgia for a revolutionary epoch hinges upon the reconstruction of oppositional identities. Militarized fascist figures are measured against Republican characters, whose depiction depends on their explicit disavowal of violence and critique of social structures built on inequality. But Rivas shows that memorial reconstruction is not a simple task. The novel highlights the gaps in memory through temporal shifts and the conflicting perspectives of alternating narrators. Rather than a set of experiences seared in a memory bank and unchanged over time, recollections are rendered as recreations from the point of remembering that emerge from and also generate individual and collective identity. The author uses these strategies to explore how memory and nostal-

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gia originate and transform over time in a creative and collective process of reconstruction. Nostalgic memory also inhabits those narratives of lived experience that reflect on attachments to an imperfect, but hopeful past that was torn apart. “I was that time, I tell myself, and that scene worthy of prayer.” (Brodsky 2017, 8, my translation). These words, written in the new preface of Últimos días de la historia by Roberto Brodsky, could serve as a motto of a generation of dissident writers in Chile after 1973. The scene with which he so profoundly identifies is the September 11 military coup, a rupture forever marking a before and after. It is significant that Brodsky’s novel, which I analyze in this book, opens with an epigraph by the Spanish novelist Juan Benet (1927–1993) whose father was killed in the Republican zone in the Spanish Civil War. Benet writes, “a day dawns, without a doubt, when the past emerges in a moment of uncertainty.” For Benet, dissonant memories inevitably seep through “ridiculing and debunking the fragile and sterile chimerical and unsatisfied condition of a tortured and fleeting present.” Brodsky echoes Benet’s 1961 collection of short stories Nunca llegarás a nada (You Will Never Amount to Anything) to open his novel and set forth a reflection on the mechanisms of memory in the wake of the Pinochet dictatorship. Nostalgia in Brodsky’s book is troubling and forms part of an alternative way of interpreting the past, one that is imbued with ambiguity and irony, challenging at every turn the official political discourse of reconciliation after the transition. The significance of this evocation of Brodsky’s novel is threefold. First, it serves to illustrate the existing parallels between Spanish and Chilean political and literary histories. Second, it underscores the elusive and obstinate nature of memory and nostalgia and their complex linkages to traumatic experience. Third, it points to the interdependent relationship between nostalgia and identity. Peeling back the layers of examples like this one, Unsettling Nostalgia goes beyond the preliminary work that stresses the value of untold stories of political conflict by exploring how the remembering subject’s understanding of hierarchies of power shape nostalgic narratives and collective identities. Nostalgic discourses either conjure sexist, classist, and racist visions of roots and nation or, conversely, appeal to unfulfilled dreams of revolutionary structural change (DiGiovanni 2017, 16). Nostalgic discourses either conjure classist, sexist, and nationalist visions of roots and nation or, conversely, appeal to unfulfilled dreams of revolutionary structural change (DiGiovanni 16, 2017). A transatlantic feminist perspective expands our understanding of post-dictatorial memory, which is a topic often regarded from a monocultural or national standpoint. Without collapsing difference, this book pushes against the limits of narrowly construed interpretations of dictatorial histories and discovers resemblances, thereby generating insights that would not be possible if these areas were

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investigated separately. The comparative framework invites reflection upon the parallels between authoritarian policies of political, cultural, economic, and gendered repression, and comments on the variations between affective and memorial responses in narrative and film. Historical time, location, and cultural context influence the authors’ and directors’ process of remembrance. From the vantage point of the post-dictatorial present, authors seem more compelled to extract stories of bravery from the repressive past than those living within it. A comparative study not only helps us to understand how related ideologies shaped the regimes’ violence, but also how literature and film might intervene, expose, and subvert such violence through the reconstruction of counter memories. NOSTALGIA, GENDER, AND GENRE Nostalgia for a pre-dictatorial past and periods of resistance in Spain and Chile bespeaks a desire for reconnection after military backlash and the recuperation of severed political goals. On the one hand, nostalgia can excessively idealize the past and in doing so play a worrisome role in generalizing and distancing the past from the present, rendering it irrelevant. But nostalgia can also have the opposite effect if it emerges alongside conflicted and critical memories of personal or collective shortcomings and incongruencies in situations, behaviors, and convictions. In this way, nostalgia might spur dialogue about the multiple meanings of the past and about the ethics of remembering. Returning to Boym, we observe a “nostalgia for what could have been; it is not a nostalgia for the ideal past, but for the present perfect and its lost potential” (Boym 2001, 21). One way that this book engages forms of nostalgia that evade stasis is through memorial accounts written and filmed by women both during or after the Franco and Pinochet dictatorships. To paraphrase Gina Herrmann’s article “Voices of the Vanquished: Leftist Women and the Spanish Civil War,” when women narrate the messiness of war, they effectively interrupt certain static historiographies and mythical representations (Herrmann 2003, 11). The digressive, complicated, incomplete, and fractured nature of such accounts makes them at once nostalgic and instructive. Herrmann makes a persuasive point: “If we really want to look at war in all its complexity, then, women’s narratives of conflict, which struggle against the limits of recognizable generic models, are the most experientially affective representational models that can give us access to the phenomenon of war” (Herrmann 2003, 11). Women’s memorial accounts of revolution and defeat reveal the vital relationship between nostalgia, critical thought, emotion, and identity. They often explore the features of gender politics on the Left in Spain and Chile

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and, as I will argue in the case studies, they reveal how gender politics have been arguably more complex and diverse than the visible mechanisms of gender hierarchies that characterized the ideologies of the Pinochet and Franco regimes. Some of the works in this book look to the Second Republic (1931–1939) and the Popular Unity (1970–1973) as times of awakening, forward-moving momentum, and shared commitments to deeper forms of justice. But they also show that in many ways dominant ideologies of the Left remained masculinist to the extent that they often ignored or devalued the struggle for gender equality. Works by Almudena Grandes, Dulce Chacón, Carmen Castillo, and Carolina Astudillo, all studied in this book, underscore the attempt by both women and men of the Left to subvert power structures and dominant influences of the Church and state on gender norms and sexual mores, but they also point to the disjuncture between theory and practice. Their works dramatize findings that historians and critics like Florencia Mallon, Isabella Cosse, and Gina Herrmann have onserved regarding tensions around patriarchal and heteronormative views on family and sexuality among the Left in the Southern Cone and Spain. Pointing out contradiction does not invalidate attempts to upend dominant forms of culture but recognizes the pervasiveness of patriarchal ideology that frames men as political leaders and women as mothers and wives. When post-dictatorial accounts written by and about women shed light on such anxieties and incongruencies, they convey what Boym calls a “nostalgia for what could have been” (Boym 2001, 21). Of course, it would be short-sighted to argue that only women’s accounts reveal troubled (i.e., complex) versus untroubled (i.e., simple) forms of nostalgia. The selection of novels and films in this study shows that representations created by both women and men have the potential to either reinsert dominant perspectives or conversely run counter to them by including multiple and dissonant points of view. Authors and filmmakers have used many genres including testimony, memoir, poetry, novels, fictional film, and documentary to represent fraught memories of revolution and resistance. Unsettling Nostalgia focuses specifically on the novel and the documentary film. While fictional narrative may seem to be an obvious choice, documentary film may not since it is often viewed as an objective genre. This book shows that documentaries also transmit nostalgia through narrative voiceover, interviews, musical score, and dramatic reconstruction, all of which are carefully selected, edited, and pieced together to convey a message. To paraphrase Belinda Smaill in The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture, where the expression of injured identities is concerned, documentary plays a small but important part in presenting avenues for imagining future possibilities of social transformation that further public debate (Smaill 2010, 70). Viewing nostalgic fictional narrative alongside documentary film engenders a reflection on the differences

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and similarities between the often-unrecognized strategies that communicate nostalgic longing. Polyphony or the inclusion of counterpoints, for instance, is a tool used by both novelists and documentarians to foreground complexity. A feminist analysis of the critical potential of nostalgic novels and documentaries forges a necessary path away from the dismissive view of nostalgia as an unproductive and irrational form of memory. For many, to be nostalgic is to see the past through a rose-tinted lens, an expression with conspicuous gendered underpinnings. Rejecting nostalgia altogether means disregarding the emotions as a source of knowledge, which feeds into patriarchal notions that diminish the value of what is deemed feminine. Narrative fiction and documentary film have the potential to encourage readers and viewers to imagine a principal place for the emotions in critical remembrance of systems of repression, as well as resistance to them. Megan Boler reminds us that feminism has long insisted that “processes of learning, social change, and education are intimately bound up with feeling” (Boler 2015, 1491). Chandra Mohanty makes a similar point when she argues that history, memory, and emotion are significant cognitive elements in the construction of selfreflective selves that lead to a rethinking of patriarchal, heterosexist, colonial, racist, and capitalist legacies (Mohanty 2003, 8). Pointing to the defense of the emotions as a wellspring of knowledge serves to invite reflection upon the crossroads between the emotional and the nostalgic and how these might contribute to our understanding of the past. To welcome new ideas about nostalgia is to chip away at a patriarchal structure of memory that devalues concepts associated with femininity. Memory and critical consciousness are activated not by overcoming the emotions, but by embracing them. RESTORATIVE NOSTALGIA IN FRANCO’S SPAIN AND PINOCHET’S CHILE If nostalgia for a time of political enthusiasm and mobilization bespeaks a rejection of the political apathy of the present in Spain and Chile, it is also a rejection of the nostalgia of the Pinochet and Franco regimes. The military governments exploited nostalgia in their discourses to further their political agendas and legitimize their authority. They used a right-wing nostalgic discourse to feed classist, sexist, and racist fantasies of roots and nation. It is precisely the well-known nationalist version of nostalgia that has compelled many critics to condemn all nostalgia as a political instrument that ignores the contradictions and complexities of the past. To understand present-day nostalgia, we must contextualize it and also understand the nostalgic discourses of the military regimes. By examining the role of nostalgic discourse in the making of the military dictatorships, as well as the counter-discourses

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of nostalgic longing conveyed by political exiles and their children, I address political systems and artistic movements within a more comprehensive political and historical framework. While this book ventures beyond Boym’s canonical text by developing the concept of “unsettling nostalgia,” it is instructive to pause on her definition of restorative nostalgia to understand the military regimes’ strategies to justify dictatorial rule. Boym argues, “Restorative nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories” (Boym 2001, 41). This form of nostalgia has been used extensively in political discourse as a rhetorical device to establish the belief in a shared past. If restorative nostalgia validates national and international rivalries and sanctions the repression of attempts to agitate for social change, then “restorative” nostalgia is the proper lens through which to analyze the culture of the military regimes. In the anthology Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender and Nationalism (1997), Jean Pickering posits that “nostalgia is a constitutive element of both gender and nationalism,” and that “modification of one makes changes in the other two” (Pickering 1997, 207). These insights serve as a springboard to discuss the overlapping relationship between nostalgia, gender, and nationalism in Spain and Chile. As Jo Labanyi points out, the Franco regime responded to the loss of colonial dominance and Spain’s sidelining within Europe by fixating on lost glory (Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008, 9). It is for that reason that Labanyi suggests that traditionally memory has been associated with authoritarian and strongly nationalist regimes. From my perspective, it is restorative nostalgia that best describes the Franco regime’s glorification of a so-called united Cathoic “patria” of the fifteenth century. That discourse functioned as a weapon to undermine Basque, Catalan and Galician nationalisms. It also served to delegitimize secularist movements and to uphold Spain’s hierarchical order based on gender, class, and race. The parallels with Chile are staggering. As the pace of social reform accelerated during the Second Republic and the Popular Unity to empower women and the working classes, reactionary “restorative” nostalgia emerged as a remedy to reassure traditionalists and to bolster the promise to decelerate social decay. In Chile, Pinochet framed the democratic transformation initiated by Salvador Allende as aberrant and looked to the nineteenth-century, strong-handed Portalian state characterized by autocratic methods of control (Constable and Valenzuela 1991, 70). At the same time, the Chilean dictator summoned the memory of Francoist Spain to vindicate an anti-communist discourse and capitalist agenda within the 1970s Cold War in Latin America. Under Franco, a nostalgia for the imperial past as opposed to the “degenerate” state of the present became a strong current in public discourse. For

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the consolidators of the regime, the past became synonymous with the “golden age” and modernity with the “Fall.” Nostalgia served the crucial function of establishing the military rebels as the “martyrs.” It also helped reshape the sufferings of the Civil War into a symbol of patriotism (DiGiovanni 2012a, 39). The bloodshed of the insurgents was not only legitimized but framed as inevitable in the history of “mankind’s” redemption. Within that teleological framework, every time there was a deviation, there was bound to be a crusade to silence dissent, and its justification was beyond question. As historian Paul Preston argues, this vision of the past, “justified the need for ‘purification,’ a euphemism for the most sweeping physical, economic and psychological repression” (Preston 2006, 305). Preston adds, “Within months of the end of hostilities, a massive ‘History of the Crusade’ was being published in weekly parts, glorifying the heroism of the victors and portraying the vanquished as the dupes of Moscow” (Preston 2006, 4). The education system, strictly under the Church’s reinstated control after the war, also played a pivotal role in children’s socialization and political indoctrination. In her book-length essay Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain (1987, 2004) Spanish novelist Carmen Martín Gaite (1925–2000) renders visible the nostalgia that shaped Spain’s postwar political discourse and served to define perceptions of family, gender, and sexuality, and also to justify Spain’s economic crisis that disproportionately impacted the working class. She cites Franco’s 1945 speech that venerated Spain’s “blessed backwardness,” proclaiming, “Our revolution made it possible for Spain to return to her true essence” (Martín Gaite 2004, 21). Franco sought to “restore” traditional Catholic patriarchal values by eliminating divorce, and religious and political freedoms, which he exclaimed were things of the reds. But at the same time, the regime’s negative reading of modernity was inconsistent. While the wealthy landowners, the Catholic Church and the monarchists had emphasized the importance of embracing tradition and religion, the Phalange, industrialists, and bankers, on the other hand, tended to advocate social modernization within totalitarian structures inspired by fascism (Labanyi 2007, 92). Groups on the right came together through their hostility towards the Second Republic’s agenda to “better the economic and legal positions of the working classes and women” (Labanyi 2007, 92) The unequivocally gendered nature of the Franco regime’s nostalgic discourse conceived of men as soldiers, nation builders, and scholars, while women were cast as wives, bearers of children and caregivers. The Second Republic (1931–1939), with its reforms to the long-established patriarchal system of values and identities, was equated with the “Fall,” and as such inevitably tied to the sin of Eve—the undoing of “mankind” due to the lust of a woman. During the regime, this religious dogma fed into gender norms that called for the subjugation of women. As evinced in media representations, women’s bodies became the terrain on which the tenets of Catholic virtue

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and chauvinism were written (DiGiovanni 40, 2012a). A network of institutions, customs, and laws that prescribed passive and pious female behavior served the socially conservative ideology, which sought to undermine attempts made to challenge traditional gender roles. This socio-political move backward was particularly demoralizing for non-Catholic, leftist women who saw in the Second Republic a path towards gender and class equality. Similar to the case of Spain, the subjugation of the political left in Chile was bound up with a restorative nostalgic discourse defending hierarchies of power and male superiority. In El peso de la noche: Nuestra frágil fortaleza histórica (1997) historian Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier describes how the Pinochet regime evoked the strong-handed state influenced by Diego Portales (1793–1837), the conservative Chilean minister of the interior, statesman and entrepreneur who became highly influential in the aftermath of Chile’s revolt against the Spanish empire. Portales and his successors governed through the 1860s frequently enforcing repression to control objection to policies including the reduction of taxes, the removal of regulations to industry, and the expansion of foreign trade, all of which secured the maximum benefit of the landed elite. Fast-forward to the 1970s and Pinochet revives Portales for a common end: to champion class hierarchies and patriarchal power. Restorative nostalgia served to deteriorate the Popular Unity’s social programs by privatizing state-controlled industries and eliminating state welfare institutions. A nostalgic interpretation of the Portalian state also became a discursive tool to unify the uneasy alliance between the landed elite, the military, the technocrats, and the powerful Opus Dei. As in the case of twentieth-century Spain, power struggles among groups on the right were outweighed by a disdain for the Popular Unity’s agenda to change the economic and legal positions of the working classes and women that began in the 1920s and developed during Allende’s tenure. The financial crisis of the 1970s, which stemmed in part from pressures from the CIA, the Nixon administration and U.S. economic elites, became central to a nostalgic discourse of “purification” and elimination of a series of “degenerative” socialist structures. Decades before the 1973 coup, Chilean conservative political parties closely watched the Spanish Civil War and for the Nationalist militarized efforts to bring an end to the progressive agenda of the Second Republic. Kirsten Weld correctly argues that “The Falangist strain of Spain’s insurrectionary coalition had an explicitly transnational dimension, encouraging the strengthening of cultural ties between Spain and erstwhile colonies and appealing, in a clearly racialized fashion, to those Latin Americans who defined their heritage as peninsular” (Weld 2018, 84). Later, during the 1970s Pinochet looked nostalgically to the Franco regime as a model authoritarian corporative state. As Weld states, “The Civil War—or at least one interpretation

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of it, in which the military had purged Spain of communism in a kind of Christian reconquest—was a key component of the paradigm that some antiSalvador Allende revanchists used to understand their world” (Weld 2018, 77). Upon Franco’s death on November 20, 1975, Pinochet traveled to Spain where King Juan Carlos and the right-wing press Pueblo received him. In an interview, the Chilean dictator stated, “I came to Spain because I wanted to pay tribute to a man who also fought against communism.” 2 The newspaper article brings out the collusion between the monarchy and the Spanish and Chilean military dictatorships, as well as the intersections between political agendas and nostalgic discourses. Pinochet was quoted stating: “If the Communists, who always lurk in the shadows, do not cause problems, Spain will achieve great goals and once again be a great country as it was in the past” (Pueblo 1975). 3 One year later in 1976, Pinochet explained to Henry Kissinger that the Chilean regime was a participant in a long-term transatlantic struggle: “It is a further stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil War” (Weld 2018, 78). Weld also underscores the influential role of Francoist thought in the development of the political ideology of Jaime Guzmán, one of Pinochet’s closest advisors and author of Chile’s 1980 constitution. “Gremialismo, Guzmán’s philosophy turned political movement, was central to the anti-Salvador Allende opposition and explicitly rooted in the military nationalism, conservative Catholic social thought, and mythology of a glorious Hispanic cultural inheritance that had undergirded the Nationalist uprising and that Franco had used to legitimate his rule” (Weld 2018, 78). Since Guzmán played a pivotal role in the construction of neoliberal ideology in Chile, it is important to also note, as Michael Lazzara does in the book Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet (2018), that another one of Guzmán’s key influences was José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Spanish fascist party the Falange. “Such early influences resulted in a special mixture of conservative Catholicism and rightwing ideology that would lead Guzmán to reject the tenets of Liberation Theology that had taken root throughout Latin America in the 1960s” (Lazzara 2018, 59). What is also striking is that in both cases, the reproduction of gender norms informed the restorative nostalgic discourse within the context of state violence. In Chile, the nation under the Popular Unity was discursively constructed by the consolidators of the regime as both a diseased body and a family in crisis that required the leadership of a strong father figure that would return health and order to Chile’s progeny. 4 In this way, in both Spain and Chile, modernity was viewed as a corrupted female body. At the same time, the maternal figure, always subordinate to the male, also became a powerful patriotic metaphor. By seizing the right to delineate the nation and gender roles, the insurrectionists in both contexts justified the purging of

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nonconformist, revolutionary women who were masculinized through the rhetoric of the regime while dissident men were conversely deemed “unmanly” (i.e., feminine) and consequently dehumanized. This restorative nostalgic discourse resonated strongly in Chile with the neo-fascist paramilitary group Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty), which emerged as a nationalist faction calling for the return of a “caudillo” state. If the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) aimed to create classconsciousness and prompt structural, economic, and cultural change, Patria y Libertad emphasized the counter-revolutionary language of authoritarian patriotism and tradition (Ensalaco 2000, 19). This vocabulary, coupled with the group’s clandestine operations of infrastructure sabotage, instilled fear and radicalized many Chileans, convincing them of the need to “return” to order and support military intervention along with its reestablishment of political, class, and gender hierarchies. Echoes of the Spanish fascist discourse are hard to ignore. In both instances, we observe the galvanizing effects of restorative nostalgia and its broader implications in the consolidation of power networks that quelled opposing voices. NOSTALGIA AND EXILE AFTER THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR To this point, I have defined various forms of nostalgia and focused on how the reactionary “restorative” sort played an instrumental role in the reinforcement of the classist and patriarchal ideologies with which the defenders of the Franco and Pinochet dictatorships identified. A restorative nostalgia helped shape the gendered lexicon of the right-wing military regimes in Spain and Chile and served to re-establish the authority of the military, the Church, and the economic elites. In light of these insights, we now turn to the voices of the opposition in exile and the transatlantic cultural exchanges between Chile and Spain from the 1930s through the 1970s to trace how nostalgia emerged differently. By examining how authors and filmmakers in exile have sought to subvert the discourses of the regimes, we contextualize contrasting forms of longing in different periods and move beyond vague and homogenizing critiques of nostalgia. Instead of framing nostalgia as a mere feature of the late twentieth-century, this discussion explores historical specificity, heterogeneity, and the genealogy of multiple forms of nostalgia and their expression in literature and film. In contrast with the conservative nostalgic vision that called for a homecoming to traditional national identities and the “natural” power hierarchies that shaped them, leftwing nostalgia was, and remains, arguably more complex and difficult to categorize. When describing the differences between right-wing and left-wing nostalgia in Spain and Chile, monochrome divisions between restorative and reflective nostalgia fall short. That is because the

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idealizing narrative of heroism and sacrifice has been a defining feature in many accounts of anti-fascist resistance. In other words, if we view “restorative” nostalgia as a form of memory that emerges in celebratory discourses that iron out troubling incongruent memories to uphold a heroic version of the past, then this form of nostalgia has not belonged to any single ideology. Within the many pages of memoirs, novels, and collections of poetry written by uprooted Spanish and Chilean exiles or by dissidents that endured political and social destruction from within, we see nostalgic responses to loss that both demonstrate Boym’s definitions and complicate them. For that reason, the term unsettling nostalgia is a more appropriate tool to describe these early nostalgic voices as well as those that came later in the post-dictatorial period. In the context of exile, unsettling nostalgia describes an emotional and intellectual response to the profound collective dissatisfactions within the dictatorial conquest perceived as the antithesis of the shattered horizons of the Republican past. We find one striking example in the poetry of Luis Cernuda (1902–1963), whose “Díptico español” (“Spanish Diptych”), constitutes the epigraph to El lector de Julio Verne (2012) by Almudena Grandes, a contemporary novel that I will analyze later in this book. I highlight this example because it is a precursor of the post-revolutionary modern-day nostalgia at the center of Unsettling Nostalgia. The image of the diptych in the title, with its two hinged wooden panels that close like a book, evokes the distant past and a longing to retrieve it. The poem represents the complexity of leftist postwar nostalgia, conveyed in literature in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Poetry like Cernuda’s offers a window to understand an earlier experience of nostalgia and allows us to consider how this previous form has influenced contemporary writers like Almudena Grandes and Dulce Chacón. For these authors, Cernuda has symbolized non-conformism and resistance to the authoritarian patriarchal state on numerous levels. Even before the Second Republic, his poetry defied societal norms by giving voice to non-heteronormative identities and desires. In “Díptico español,” published in Desolación de la quimera (1956–1962) and later used by Almudena Grandes in El lector de Julio Verne (2012), Cernuda recalls from exile in Mexico earlier contexts of immense potential in Spain. “For you, the real Spain is not that obscene and depressing one, where today the scum rule as masters, but rather the alive and always noble Spain that Galdós created in his books. It is that Spain that comforts us and cures this one” (cited in Grandes 2012, my translation). 5 Cernuda not only locates himself within a wider political story but also reaches out to his fellow compatriots whose sense of community was in crisis. Cernuda’s nostalgic discourse subverts the Francoist claim to an eternal National-Catholic identity by recalling the age of the First Republic (1873–1874). Its celebration of the nineteenth-century realist novelist Benito

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Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) “consoles” and “cures” the deficient postwar present. Nostalgia becomes a personal and collective lens through which to interpret the lost Spanish Civil War in juxtaposition with the retrograde here and now of the Franco dictatorship. Cernuda uses the two-Spains trope to explain how a nation with vast progressive vision could become a site of stagnation. On the one hand, the poem adopts an arguably flattening nostalgic lens that mythifies the pre-dictatorial past and mourns the loss of the distant Republic. On the other hand, this kind of nostalgia contrasts with the regime’s “restorative” nostalgia to the extent that it disrupts the conservative colonial gaze. As Cecilia Enjuto Rangel points out in Cities in Ruins, the nostalgia that characterizes Modern poets like Cernuda differs from the restorative sort by presenting a critical reevaluation of the imperial past and its monumentalizing aesthetic (Enjuto Rangel 2010, 4–5). 6 The nostalgic vision of the Second Republic that characterizes Cernuda’s “Díptico español” also permeates Pablo Neruda’s well-known España en el corazón (1937), as well as the less canonical reflections of Roser Bru i Llop, a Catalan Spanish Civil War exile who arrived in Chile on the Winnipeg in 1939. As noted in the prologue, Neruda organized the transport of over 2,100 Spanish Civil War exiles to Chile after serving as a diplomat in Spain during the Second Republic. Among them were the Catalan painters Roser Bru i Llop and José Balmes, both cited in the article Por obra y gracia del Winnipeg by Julio Gálvez Barraza (2001). 7 Looking back on the experience of exile in Chile, Bru i Llop writes, “Life was made with births and deaths. But we learned to belong. It was a ‘discovery’ of America upside down and without winners” (Gálvez Barraza 2001, my translation). 8 She recasts exile in Chile as a journey and undermines the colonialist rhetoric of the Francoist victors through a politics of solidarity. If the National Catholic regime waged war for a restoration of a single Spanish identity based on power hierarchies of gender, class, and nation, then figures like Bru i Llop and Cernuda mused on the experience and expression of difference and exchange. NOSTALGIA AS A TOOL OF POLITICAL MOBILIZATION AND TRANSATLANTIC SOLIDARITY Nostalgia emerged among Spanish exiles in Chile as a longing to recover broken pieces of a revolutionary past left in ruins after the Spanish Civil War, but it also became a powerful tool and a source of inspiration throughout the 1960s. It was a time when many Catalans, Spaniards, and Chileans mobilized in social networks within Chile’s shifting political climate. Nostalgia for the Second Republic surged during Chile’s period of socialist mobilization (1970–1973) and helped shape the political discourse to rally support for the Popular Unity government. Old transnational kinships were reignited

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through nostalgia, and new ones were born. For many Chileans and Spaniards, it was part of a long trajectory of shared struggle. The folk-inspired socially committed music of La nueva canción chilena (Chilean New Song) emerged within anti-imperialist and indigenous justice movements. At the same time in Catalonia, the Nova Cançó (New Song) developed in dialogue with Spanish and Catalan republican exiles during the late Franco period. In 1969 singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat performed Cantares live in Chile at the Teatro Monumental and nostalgically paid tribute to the memory of the exiled poet Antonio Machado while effectively voicing a transatlantic politics of solidarity. Chilean artists, writers and musicians like Rolando Alarcón (1929–1973) re-animated empowering memories of the Spanish Civil War through the reproduction of Republican hymns. Listening to Spanish Civil War songs like “Si me quieres escribir” in the context of the Chilean Popular Unity was a nostalgic act that inspired visions of collective dreams for social transformation. Songs, images, and stories brought by Spanish exiles in 1939 moved from the private to the public sphere in a visible way by 1969 in Chile, allowing a new generation to imagine a continuity with the aspirations of the Second Republic. At once, leftist nostalgia seemed to laud the onward movement of revolutionary history and the dawn of a new era. As Boym reminds us, the word revolution means “both cyclical repetition and the radical break” (Boym 2001, 19). Ritual commemoration linked Chileans and Spaniards with various generational claims to an earlier symbolic time and place. Such a nostalgic act was part of a larger effort to rally hope in the Popular Unity and raise critical consciousness. This is a powerful example of how leftist political discourse has developed in concert with discourses of nostalgia. The renewal of existing linkages became a response to the ongoing vulnerabilities that marked the deeply contentious historical context of the revolutionary 1960s and early 1970s in Chile. What is more, this sense of regeneration, heightened by Allende’s 1970 election, further politicized the Spanish left within Spain against the 1970s backdrop of a thirty-year-old military regime and moribund dictator. While Joan Manuel Serrat sang “Cantares” at the Teatro Monumental in Chile in 1969, another Spanish intellectual and art critic living in Spain, José María Moreno Galván, traveled to Chile to participate in the creation of an international museum in support of the Popular Unity called the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende. In March of 1971, a commission composed of Latin American and European historians, critics and artists curated artworks that commemorated transnational solidarity. Some of the artifacts were produced during the Spanish Civil War, praising Chile’s effort to support the Second Republic. The museum was backed by Allende, which was a highly symbolic act since he was the minister of health in 1939 and lobbied to aid

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Spanish Republican refugees who arrived in Chile on the Winnipeg after the war. This nostalgic homage to transatlantic solidarity was violently shut down after the September 11, 1973 coup. Many of the artworks were hidden, but some reemerged in expositions in Barcelona and Madrid after Franco’s 1975 death in an attempt to denounce the Pinochet regime and stand with the Chilean community in exile, as well as those experiencing internal exile in Chile. 9 With the return of democracy, the museum was reestablished in Santiago and continues to be an inspirational site of multigenerational reflection and political dialogue. These brief evocations of exchanges spanning the 1930s to the 1970s point to a longer history of transatlantic solidarities and serve to contextualize post-dictatorial nostalgia. An interpretation of these earlier periods highlights the plurality of nostalgia’s sources and manifestations and sets the groundwork for a new, less reductive, conceptual framework to analyze contemporary memory and nostalgia. TRANSNATIONAL REDRESS AND THE MEMORY BOOM My discussion so far has emphasized the need to understand the specificity of nostalgic representation and its multiple individual and collective functions and forms. It has established a foundation for the case studies that examine the intersectional nature of identities and their depiction in nostalgic fictional narratives and documentary films today. It has also reiterated the potential of an interdisciplinary approach to doing memory studies. To further contextualize contemporary nostalgia, we must turn to the historical factors and sources that have contributed to the rise of nostalgia, and the memory boom more broadly, at the end of the twentieth century. As we have seen, nostalgic accounts have appeared in the context of exile and political repression as a tool to mitigate the pain of loss and to mobilize the opposition. Equally significant, and central to this book, is the emergence of nostalgia in novels and films decades after the transition to democracy. In tracing the proliferation of nostalgic cultural production that surfaced at the turn of the millennium, the transatlantic development of the 1998 Pinochet case stands out as a mobilizing factor. It is not that memory projects suddenly “broke the silence” since The Spanish Civil War and the Pinochet regime had already generated an extensive bibliography by the time of former dictator’s arrest. Instead, I am suggesting that contesting the regimes’ nationalist narratives and commemorating the victims in both Spain and Chile after 1998 gained paramount importance in a new kind of literature and cinema of memory marked by a reinvigorated emphasis on accountability. Jo Labanyi contends that “it was only in the late 1990s that historical studies, novels, and documentary and feature films started to focus overwhelmingly

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on the wartime and postwar Francoist repression (2008: 124). The transatlantic workings of the Pinochet case, involving political demands and condemnations tied to a discourse of transitional justice and a rejection of impunity, dovetailed not coincidentally with what Alexander Wilde has called a particularly salient “irruption of memory” (Wilde 1999, 475). Among the Pinochet case’s competing actors were Spanish judge Baltazar Garzón, the Valencian attorney Joan Garcés (one of Allende’s former advisors) and José María Aznar (1996–2004), the conservative Prime Minister and former fascist youth. Aznar would either sympathize with Pinochet (a vocal admirer of Franco) and in doing so ally himself with the ex-dictator’s wealthy Chilean business brotherhood (the bedfellows of Spanish entrepreneurs). Or, he would endorse Judge Garzón’s petition for Pinochet’s extradition to Spain, an appeal with strong Spanish advocacy particularly among the Socialist Party (PSOE) and other groups on the left. Like his two neoliberal allies, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President George W. Bush, the leader of the conservative Popular Party discouraged the former dictator’s extradition to Spain and trial. Despite Aznar’s disapproval, Pinochet was indicted on October 1998 and placed on house arrest for a year and a half before being released for return to Chile in 2000. While he was charged in Chile by Judge Juan Guzmán Tapia, he died before any conviction in 2006. Over the following decade, Garzón would turn his attention to Spain, investigating Franco-era crimes until conservative leaders suspended him from judicial activity in 2011 amid heated debates surrounding the limitations of Spain’s Amnesty Law. The impact of Pinochet’s arrest on the evolution of memory activism and nostalgic cultural production in Spain is hard to overstate. We should recall that the Navarrese sociologist Emilio Silva, the co-founder of the Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory, sought to draw attention to the 30,000 corpses that remained in mass graves throughout Spain. In his article “Mi abuelo también fue un desaparecido” (“My Grandfather Was Also Disappeared,” 2000), Silva alluded to the case of Chile to address Spain’s unsettled past. Silva’s call to dig up the past began in 2000 when the ARMH started the first non-clandestine excavations of mass graves containing the bodies of victims of the Francoist repression during and after the war. In placing the Spanish case alongside the Chilean one, the ARMH, like this book, puts forth what Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller describe as a “connective rather than comparative approach that places claims, responses and strategies of redress emerging from different contexts in conversation with each other” (Hirsch and Miller 2011, 8).

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THE PINK TIDE AND THE RISE OF NOSTALGIA Nostalgia surged in the early 2000s and arose in concert with the Pinochet case and the burgeoning human rights movements working towards redress. This surge coincided with what has been defined as the “Pink Tide” or “la marea rosa.” The term refers to a region-wide wave of pro-leftist democratic governments that sought to overturn neoliberal policies and to reduce the power of the economic elites, the military, and the Catholic Church. By the mid-2000s, Chileans rallied to elect socialist Michelle Bachelet, who went on to serve two non-consecutive terms (2006–2010 and 2014–2018). Not only was she the first woman to occupy the position, but her father, Alberto Bachelet Martínez, was one of the victims of the Pinochet regime. As a constitutionalist Air Force General, the military rebels detained and tortured him for treason, causing his sudden death in prison in 1974. Michelle Bachelet’s administration played a pivotal role in the construction of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, which opened in 2009 to historicize the coup and commemorate the victims of political persecution. The Bachelet administration also sought to address gender and class inequality by expanding social welfare programs and supporting some feminist objectives. As Gwynn Thomas maintains, Chile’s center-left governments have a mixed record in promoting gender equality and LGBTQ rights, but they made “gradual progress, particularly in terms of legal reforms around violence against women and in improving women’s socioeconomic position” (2019, 116). While the Pink Tide is usually associated with a turn to the left in Latin America, it is significant that during the same period in Spain in the wake of the Pinochet case, the left rallied to overturn rightwing economic policies and transform socially conservative norms. With the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero defeated the Popular Party and served two terms from 2004–2011. His government passed significant social reforms, including the legalization of same-sex marriage, the expansion of reproductive rights, and the increase in the minimum wage. Similar to the case of Bachelet in Chile, Zapatero’s family suffered direct consequences of the military uprising and subsequent regime. In 2007, his administration passed the Law of Historical Memory despite intense opposition from the right. The law condemned the Franco dictatorship, gave recognition to the regime’s victims, authorized the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings, and sanctioned state funding of the identification and exhumation of victims of Francoist repression. With the return of the conservative Popular Party in 2011, some of the law’s vital measures involving state funding of exhumations were blocked; however, Zapatero’s government gained important ground by removing statues celebrating Francoism and by contributing to the advancement of historical research and alternative narratives. A mutual

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exchange of inspiration and influence among activists, politicians, historians, authors, filmmakers, viewers, and readers in both Spain and Chile shaped this turning point. DISENCHANTMENT AS A SOURCE OF NOSTALGIA In times of crisis, nostalgia can facilitate a sense of continuity of collective identity and provide a source of inspiration for activism and social change. By establishing a link between a self in the present and an image of a self or a desired community in the past, nostalgic memory plays a role in the shaping of a feeling of belonging. Nostalgic memories idealize a more enchanting world of yesterday as a model for creative renewal within the disheartening world of the here-and-now. In searching for the sources of the twenty-firstcentury nostalgia wave in Chile and Spain, the arrest of Pinchet in 1998 stands out as a galvanizing moment that contributed to the rise of memory culture. With that said, there is another significant social phenomena that has predated that landmark. That social phenomenon has been characterized as “el desencanto,” or a period of disenchantment. In Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain, Katherine Hite asks, “Why has the question of memory, and in particular memories of struggle, war, conflict, and violence, exploded with such force today?” (Hite 2012, 1). Her answer pivots on the tensions between disillusionment and nostalgic desire: “It is certainly in part because memory is constitutive of who we are and how we interpret the here and now, and for many, the here and now is deplorable. . . . In our search for explanations of what, exactly, went wrong, and how we became so unmoored, so powerless, we become melancholic, nostalgic, and reflective” (Hite 2012, 1–2). Hite’s reflection allows us to circle back to the opening of this introduction, which links disenchantment, nostalgia, and political mobilization. The term “el desencanto” has been used to describe the wide-spread feeling of disappointment toward the democratic systems that followed the collapse of the Pinochet and Franco dictatorships. In the case of Spain, the sentiment became pervasive during the 1980s and 1990s. Jo Labanyi explains, “The left’s desencanto was rooted in an awareness of the discrepancy between the enormous energy invested over the long years of the anti-Franco struggle and the minimal concessions to leveling social and economic reform gained as a result of the transition” (Graham and Labanyi 1995, 313). The chasm between the hope for meaningful change and the angst over the continuity of class and gendered hierarchies worsened with the ongoing splintering of leftist alliances. While rightwing nostalgia in Spain gave rise to the statement “Con Franco vivíamos mejor” (“We were better off with Franco”),

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an ironic leftist nostalgia inspired the response, “Contra Franco vivíamos mejor” (“We were better off against Franco”). Irony and nostalgia come together in this final phrase that captures post-Franco disillusionment. Likewise, many Chileans who had sacrificed for the anti-Pinochet resistance, experienced yet another defeat in the mid-1990s as the social and economic reforms of the transition failed to come close to their collective goals. For feminists and LGBTQ groups that saw the centrality of patriarchal ideology to the dictatorship, the critique of the politics of consensus in 1990s Chile also had gendered dimensions (Thomas 2019, 122). Center-left governments dismissed calls to upend heteropatriarchal policies involving the suppression of reproductive rights, marriage equality, and transgender identity recognition. As Gwynn Thomas, citing Liesl Haas, points out “Many female activists experienced the reluctance of the Concertación to respond to feminist demands as a betrayal of the ideals of democratization and the immense work done by the women’s movements in both delegitimizing the military government and in bringing back democracy” (Thomas 2019, 124). The wavering between disenchantment, hesitant desire, and nostalgia was experienced in Spain against a 1990s post-dictatorial backdrop in which trials for Francoist perpetrators of state repression seemed out of reach. After Franco’s death, official confrontations with the past were silenced by the political amnesty of 1977 that protected those guilty of crimes sanctioned by the dictatorship. As Paul Preston reminds us, in that period, thirty years before the passing of the Law of Historical Memory, there would be no public funding of “commemorations, excavations, and research connected to the war” (Preston 2006, 12). That was not the case in Chile where lawyers, politicians, and human rights activists put forth a public campaign at the close of the dictatorship to confront the human rights violations of the Pinochet regime. The Rettig Report, released in 1991 during the presidency of President Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) included human rights abuses resulting in death or disappearance. The Valech Report, published in 2004 during the administration of Ricardo Lagos (2000–2006), cataloged the techniques of imprisonment and interrogation. The creation of the official torture report represented a critical measure, but it is also true that most of the human rights violators benefited from impunity. In the following decade, “el desencanto” among the Pinochet regime’s critics was exacerbated with the death of the dictator in 2006 after his release from house arrest. That disillusionment, however, did not lead to complete political apathy among the left. It was precisely that year, 2006, that Chileans elected Michelle Bachelet on a platform of change and later re-elected her in 2014. Many have lauded her public investment in a culture of memory through the establishment of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, as well as her prioritization of gender equality and the reduction of poverty.

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Others, as in the case of Zapatero’s Spain, have found the reach of Bachelet’s administration extremely limited. The cultural ethos identified with leftist disenchantment and nostalgia at the end of the millennium in Chile and Spain must also be viewed within a global framework. In Twilight Memories, written in the mid-1990s, Andreas Huyssen associates the crisis of utopian thought with a chain of defeats including the shortcomings of socialist alternatives (Soviet Union, China, Cuba) and their inefficacy to deal with the rise of structural inequalities (Huyssen 1995, 87). At the same time, Huyssen emphasizes the persistence of the utopian longings that socialism had spurred into being. In retrospect, Huyssen’s statements seem to anticipate the rise of the left in the early 2000s. In 1995 he observed, “disillusionment and utopia are far from being mutually exclusive, and rather than assuming the end of utopia lock, stock, and barrel, it might make more sense to ask whether perhaps the utopian imagination has been transformed in recent decades” (Huyssen 1995, 86). For Chilean philosopher Martín Hopenhayn, a “loss of belief in large-scale projects, collective stories, and societal utopias” arises together with “an urgency to counter the new waves of political pragmatism and individual cynicism, by way of illusions and proposals infused with new content, perhaps with greater humility and fewer pretensions than the previous utopias, but not ineffective for this” (Hopenhayn 2001, ix). Hopenhayen, similar to the authors and filmmakers that I study in this book, advocates resistance to neoliberal capitalism that perpetuates the injustice of power hierarchies and urges the exploration of discourses of difference and symbolic action that is neither apocalyptic nor integrated in the neoliberal now (Hopenhayn 2001, 46). MAPPING THE NOSTALGIC TURN IN FICTION AND FILM The reestablishment of democracy in Chile in 1990 ushered in many publications that engaged conflictive memories of the military regime but not from an overtly nostalgic perspective. Examples of anti-nostalgic texts from the early to mid 1990s include Ariel Dorfman’s La muerte y la doncella (1991), Alberto Fuguet’s Mala onda (1991), Pía Barros’s Astride (1992), José Leandro Urbina’s Cobro revertido (1993), Diamela Eltit’s Los vigilantes (1994), Pedro Lemebel’s Loco afán: crónicas de sidario (1996), and Ana María del Río’s A tango abierto (1996). In film, examples include La flaca Alejandra (1994) by Carmen Castillo, Amnesia (1994) by Gonzalo Justiniano and Estadio Nacional (2001) by Carmen Luz Parot. These works defy easy classification; however, many critics would agree that they either communicate a discourse at odds with nostalgia or imbue the past only subtly with the tensions between disenchantment and nostalgia. Regarding Los vigilantes, Francine Masiello argues “Eltit shows that there is no space for nostalgia

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while discussing the merits of family, no idyllic private or public space that respects adults and children. Instead, ruin is set on all thinking subjects; the Latin American family as myth is destroyed. The mask is finally removed” (2001, 137). Front and center are the dismal political, cultural, and economic legacies of the Pinochet regime through characters who are traumatized, displaced, and dejected, or driven and eroded by consumer culture, competition, and apathy. We are left with the dystopia of neoliberal capitalism, whereby disillusionment often replaces solidarity and despair supersedes hope. The development of Chile’s memory culture after Pinochet also involves the diaspora in the 1970s and 1980s that produced an extensive bibliography of texts that grieved the severance of ties to communities and to the vibrant cultural environment of the Allende years. Poets, novelists, and filmmakers who experienced the coup like Marjorie Agosín, Roberto Bolaño, Patricio Guzmán, Roberto Brodsky, Carlos Cerda, Germán Marín, Antonio Skarmeta, and Ariel Dorfman are examples of Chilean exiles whose work grapples with questions of rupture and reveal some traces of nostalgia. But perhaps the most recognized Chilean author among international readers is Isabel Allende, whose La casa de los espíritus (1982) became one of the most popular translated novels written in Spanish. The narrative’s combination of an attachment to the homeland and an idealization of a lost political milieu within the format of a historical romance attests to the lure of simple nostalgia. For that reason, the novel garnered negative responses from Chilean writers in exile, as well as those who stayed in Chile enduring an internal exile and depicting a more vexing portrait of the pre- and post-coup past. The widespread disenchantment in Spain that spanned from the transition through the early 1990s resonates in anti-nostalgic novels and films like Si te dicen que caí (1973) by Juan Marsé and adapted to film by Vicente Aranda (1989), El cuarto de atrás (1978) by Carmen Martín Gaite, and Historias del Kronen (1995) by José Ángel Mañas and adapted to film by Montxo Armendáriz (1995). We find parallels between these works and the antinostalgic novels by Chilean authors described above. In both cases, they contrast with works that came later in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As Antonio López Quiñones suggests in the book La guerra persistente: Memoria, violencia y utopia, the lingering “desencanto” in Spain at the turn of the millennium eventually motivated some writers to search for utopian political traditions in the past that offered an alternative to a model of neoliberal capitalist democracy. To paraphrase López Quiñones, a sense nostalgia resulted from dashed post-dictatorial aspirations: “Given the difficulty of developing future utopian visions, some found a symbolic space in the past and in those moments that housed transformative potential” (2006, 201). 10 When we chart the swell of nostalgic works dedicated to the Spanish Civil War and postwar, we find that the trend developed over time, approxi-

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mately sixty years after the end of the war. It was within the political climate of the Pinochet case and widespread disenchantment that the number of feature and documentary films, historical novels, testimonies, historiographies surged in Spain and revealed a renewed interest in the Spanish Civil War and postwar. That spurt of nostalgic cultural production emerged within a flood of memory works often called a “memory boom.” In other words, a smaller “nostalgia current” or “nostalgia wave” occurred inside the larger memory boom and involved authors and filmmakers of multiple generations, including a prominent younger generation that did not experience the war directly. In an attempt to listen anew to Spanish Civil War stories, many began to excavate archives and interview victims of the Franco regime. Some well-known examples include La lengua de la mariposas (1996 novel, 1999 film) and El lápiz del carpintero (1998 novel, 2003 film) by Manuel Rivas, Soldados de Salamina (2001 novel, 2003 film) by Javier Cercas and La voz dormida (2002 novel, 2011 film) by Dulce Chacón. In Chile, the watershed events surrounding the Pinochet case also coincided with a torrent of memory works visible in bookstores and theaters. As Katherine Hite argues, “With Pinochet’s arrest, debates about the past had moved quite perceptibly beyond the private spaces of homes and gatherings of close friends to the public sphere and the streets (Hite 2000, xiii). Alexander Wilde suggests that what began as a trickle of cultural production in 1990 turned into a heavy flow by 1998. That was also the year that marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military coup. As I previously stated, for Wilde, 1998 constituted a particularly salient “irruption of memory,” which he characterizes as a proliferation of public events, ceremonies, publications and trials that “remind the political class and citizens alike of the unforgotten past” (Wilde 1999, 475). While 1998 was not the first “irruption,” it was, as Wilde argues, astounding in its magnitude. That irruption only grew with the 2002 investigation of the Riggs Bank scandal. It was at that time that Pinochet’s reputation became sullied even for his most faithful followers. These events served as a powerful catalyst for the dissemination of even more works about the pre-coup past. Michael Lazzara states, “This change in the former dictator’s public image was accompanied by an unprecedented resurgence of reflection on former socialist president Salvador Allende, whose legacy had largely been silenced in official circles since the transition’s early years” (Lazzara 2009, 47). What many authors and filmmakers in the new nostalgia current share is an attempt to derive meaning from stories of injustice, mass atrocity, and resistance. In the case of Spain, all of the previously mentioned writers were born after the war in the 1950s or early 1960s, and as such, they also share a similar generational claim. In the case of Chile, a significant number of films including Mi vida con Carlos (2010) by German Berger-Hertz and El edificio de los Chilenos by Marcarena Aguiló, La ciudad de los fotógrafos (2006) and

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Guerrero (2017) by Sebastián Moreno, and Lumi Videla (2017) by Paz Ahumada were produced by filmmakers that were born around the time of the military coup or after. As a tool to understand the memory narratives of this cohort of authors and filmmakers in Chile and Spain, many critics have used Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory to describe the recollections of children who have experienced the effects of political conflict, war, and postwar repression in relation to their parents and grandparents. The concept of postmemory is thought-provoking and useful to analyze memory production in Spain and Chile; however, as Unsettling Nostalgia demonstrates, the term cannot be applied to describe the entire nostalgia current. The concept allows us to consider how the second generation’s longing for a time predating their birth might arise from the lingering nostalgia conveyed to them by their parents or other members of the Civil War generation. The postmemory theoretical framework also allows us to consider how the younger generation’s temporal remove from the worst human rights violations might provide them either with a distance that highlights and sharpens complexity or conversely that gives them a hazy retrospective lens that blurs or mutes contradictions. These tendencies are not always mutually exclusive, nor do they inevitably apply to all writers and filmmakers with similar generational claims. As the chapters illustrate, late twentiethcentury unsettling nostalgia crosses generational boundaries, thereby challenging prescriptive generational logic. While the generational issue is important to recognize, I agree with Fredric Jameson who insists that generational logic is a classificatory system that often seeks a totality that does not entirely reflect the heterogeneity of experience (Jameson 2003, 229). TRAUMA, HAUNTING, AND THE NOSTALGIA CRITIQUE Spanish and Chilean cultural production in the late 1990s effectively took a nostalgic turn as authors and filmmakers of multiple generations increasingly began to transform otherwise traumatic stories of political persecution into inspiring narratives of solidarity and resistance. That turn, and the general shift to the emotional response to the past, has been viewed with skepticism by many critics. In Spain, Ángel Loureiro distinguishes between the documentaries about the Spanish Civil War from the mid-1970s and those of the early twenty-first century, critiquing the latter. “While older documentaries broach the war in political terms, and present personal hardships as a price paid to realize collective goals, the more recent documentaries rest primarily on a pathetic or sentimental rhetoric of unmediated affects” (Loureiro 2008, 233). The directors of recent films, according to Loureiro, “are content to remain on the surface of things, engaging in facile presentation of suffering” (Loureiro 2008, 233). Other cultural critics have articulated similar conten-

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tions about the tendency to simplify and romanticize the Second Republic in Spanish literature and cinema. These include Antonio Gómez López Quiñones in La guerra persistente (2006), Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas in “Screening the Past: History and Nostalgia in Contemporary Spanish Cinema” (2000), and Vicente Sánchez-Biosca in Cine y Guerra Civil española: del mito a la memoria (2006), among others. Likewise, in Chile, oversimplified portraits of the Popular Unity in film, television, and literature have prompted many to question how cultural production might move beyond reductive forms of diversion. Michael Lazzara notes a problematic shift in 2003 during the thirtieth anniversary of the military coup when emblematic images of the coup were recycled “such that they were emptied of their impact and divested (to some degree) of the weight and density of the traumas to which they alluded” (Lazzara 2009, 47–48). If we place these critiques in conversation with Loureiro, as well as Argentine critic Beatriz Sarlo, we find some remarkable similarities as they all worry that memorial reconstructions often fail to attend to the political complexity underpinning social revolutions (Sarlo 2004, 49). What is essential in the nostalgia critique is the understanding of the danger of creating mythologies that diminish the complexities of history and generate silences upon other silences while giving the impression that consumers are recuperating the past. Such arguments urge us to question how decontextualized depictions mitigate the disillusionment of the present by turning the horrifying past into a form of entertainment. Returning to Huyssen, this time in “Nostalgia for Ruins”: “it is difficult to walk the line between sentimental lament over a loss and the critical reclaiming of a past for the purposes of constructing alternative futures” (Huyssen 2006, 9). In “Memory and Modernity in Democratic Spain: The Difficulty of Coming to Terms with the Spanish Civil War” (2007), Jo Labanyi argues for an aesthetics of haunting as a way of dealing with a traumatic past. Labanyi describes the representation of ghosts in post-Franco cinema as an illuminating way to acknowledge the traces of those political dissidents who were forbidden to leave a trace. The image of the ghost becomes a symbol of those victims who demand reparation. Furthermore, she insists that “the trope of haunting can be seen as a recognition of the fact that no narrative of atrocities can do justice to the pain of those who experienced such atrocities firsthand” (2007, 111). For Labanyi, this is a “more ethical position than the assumption, in those texts that opt for documentary realism, that it is possible to recreate for the reader or spectator a direct experience of the wartime and postwar repression as they were lived at the time” (2007, 111). She differentiates between novels and films that call attention to the complexity of memory by deviating from established modes of storytelling and those “realist” style works that convey the idea that “the past can be unproblematically recovered” (2007, 106). Labanyi’s ideas about haunting memory challenge

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the assumption that all post-Franco memory works function in the same way. She contends that films like The Spirit of the Beehive and The Devil’s Backbone, which draw on the horror genre, are “more successful in dealing with a traumatic past than those films and novels, and testimonies that adopt a realist or documentary mode, precisely because they acknowledge the horror—that is the ‘unspeakable’” (2007, 107). The conceptualization of the haunting trope has shaped how many cultural critics interpret and categorize ways of remembering dictatorial trauma, and it has offered an entryway to make further distinctions. MODES OF MEMORY AND NOSTALGIA To differentiate between memory works, I have identified various modes of transmission, which include the anti-nostalgic mode (i.e., El espiritu de la colmena, Los vigilantes), the unsettling nostalgic mode (El corazón helado, Estrella distante), and the reductive or restorative nostalgic mode (La voz dormida, La casa de los espiritus). The first category, which is not the focus of this book, could be broken down into subcategories including un-nostalgic testimonial or fictional realism and, conversely, what Labanyi calls “indirect representation of the past through its aftereffects” (i.e., the haunting trope) (Labanyi 2007, 108). To extend Labanyi’s claims, haunting memory is unsettling by nature, whereas different forms of anti-nostalgic realism may or may not disquiet readers and viewers. This anti-nostalgic mode may also apply to perpetrator confessions, which Leigh Payne analyzes in Unsettling Accounts (2007). Payne’s title has a double meaning and in part served as an inspiration for the title of this book. She problematizes notions of reconciliation in post-dictatorial societies, including Chile, through close readings of confessions, and their framing in media outlets. The second mode, which constitutes the cornerstone of this book, involves “unsettling nostalgia,” and it differs from the anti-nostalgic mode in its fusion of idealization and critical reflection. Adding to what I have already explained in this introduction, unsettling nostalgia is a term that describes an unwillingness to accept or simply “settle” the past. But unlike the aforementioned anti-nostalgic mode, unsettling nostalgia also describes an elegiac way of evoking memories of unrealized collective dreams. It is not always ironic or mischievous like Boym’s “reflective nostalgia,” but it is always imbued with thought-provoking, and even haunting, tensions that are generative as they move readers and viewers to see the past and its legacies anew. The novel El lápiz del carpintero (1998) by Manuel Rivas is once again a useful example, this time to demonstrate how literature merges the haunting trope with nostalgia. The ghostly figure of the painter at the center of the narrative symbolizes the haunting presence of the murdered Republic.

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The phantom constitutes a literary manifestation of unsettling nostalgia, one that summons the lost creative potential of that period and subverts the violent patriarchal structures of the military victors (DiGiovanni 2017, 26). Novels like Rivas’s create their own paradigm. They allow us to understand a different kind of nostalgia, unsettling nostalgia, as a form of memory evoked by a sense of loss and capable of provoking a critical engagement with the past while raising collective consciousness about the past’s significance in the present. Such unsettling nostalgic narratives constitute creative responses to the delegitimization of oppositional voices by offering histories of quests for social connection, critical consciousness, and redress. The “unsettling” in unsettling nostalgia connotes disruption and, in many cases involving post-dictatorial Spain and Chile, a confrontation with not only the atrocities of the Right but also the sexist betrayals and homophobic contempt of the Left. The concept thus relates to what Carl Fischer calls “elegies to utopias” in Queering the Chilean Way: Cultures of Exceptionalism and Sexual Dissidence, 1965–2015 (2016). Fischer’s book explores how authors and filmmakers retrospectively invoke the Popular Unity period as a time charged with energy and creative potential, but also a time still steeped in a heteronormative patriarchal culture that excluded and patronized sexual others. Whereas Queering the Chilean Way focuses on Chile, Unsettling Nostalgia records the transatlantic character of nostalgia and the multiple ways that it shapes depictions of Spain’s and Chile’s utopian aspirations but also contests their shortcomings. Here, particular attention is paid to how unsettling nostalgia takes to task the maintenance of entrenched societal norms that prescribed monolithic motherhood and heterosexuality. The third mode involves reductive or restorative nostalgia. Building on my earlier discussion, these two words are used interchangeably in this book even though they seem oppositional in nature. Restoration typically denotes generative power while reduction signifies the contrary. But, in the misguided attempt to restore memory intact, elisions or missing pieces go unacknowledged. The deadening of complexity is inevitable. By using the term reductive in addition to restorative, I emphasize this process. Reductive nostalgia, as a form of transmission, characterizes films and novels that purport to engage deeply with the past, but ultimately disseminate an account that is at best lacking nuance, and, at worst depthless and schematic. While most critics have used the term “restorative nostalgia” to exclusively analyze right-wing regimes and their reactionary rhetoric, this book traces how the restorative mode can also characterize discourses of the left that mystify and romanticize. For example, Las trece rosas (2007) directed by Emilio Martínez Lázaro is a mostly depoliticized Hollywood-style portrait of the thirteen young women executed by the Francoist firing squad at the end of the Spanish Civil War. In Lázaro’s film, plots of romance and betrayal eclipse the story of women’s involvement in the Unified Socialist Youth

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(JSU). What could have been a cutting exploration of a gendered state crime instead becomes a love story with blunted ideological and historical edges. This example illustrates how the reconstruction of repressed figures can ironically create a distancing effect that renders revolutionary struggles as kitschy relics of an irrevocably lost past. CENTRAL THEMES: RETURN, EDUCATION, AND RESISTANCE In charting the new nostalgia current, I have traced three recurrent themes that allow authors and filmmakers to join sharp historical inquiry with an inspired nostalgic vision. The quest for transgenerational communication is one of these defining themes. In Spain, the search for Republican roots is a common narrative strategy that sets the new nostalgia current apart from the earlier forms that emerged among a generation of Republican exiles from the 1940s through the 1970s as a response to defeat. The return home to repair broken bonds and to establish new ones also distinguishes the new nostalgia current in Chile from the earlier exile nostalgic narratives of the 1970s and 1980s. Contemporary authors and filmmakers imbue stories of homecoming after forced displacement with a desire for reconnection and the recuperation of places, as well as a cultural milieu suffocated under the pressure of the regime. Here we can apply Hirsch and Miller’s insights in Rites of Return (2011) to the contexts of Chile and Spain alike to contend that the legacies of state violence have engendered a set of practices that involve “the reconstruction of past histories, the retrieval of lost communities, the activation of historic sites, and the quest for origins” (2011, xi). But, as all of the authors and filmmakers in this book reveal, a return home is not synonymous with recovery or consolation. The sorrow of loss remains; however, they also suggest that the encounter with the past through letters, photographs, archival footage, objects, sites, and dialogues, may become an empowering act. One of the examples that I include involves Carmen Castillo, a former militant of the Revolutionary Left who resisted the regime clandestinely then fled into exile under threat. In Calle Santa Fe, she returns to Chile to re-establish relationships and reclaim the house on Santa Fe Street where Miguel Enriquez, her partner and leader of the MIR, was gunned down. As she shows us in her unsuccessful attempt to reclaim the house, in the end, forging bonds through memory is equally if not more important than the reclamation of the physical building. In this way, return becomes a form of “activist remembrance” (Hirsch and Miller 2011, 17). The second theme that characterizes the recent swell of nostalgic cultural production in Spain and Chile involves the centrality of education. Although gender, racial, and class equality were never fully achieved during the Second Republic or the Popular Unity, education became a crucial site in the

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process of creating a more just and egalitarian society through critical consciousness. It is consequently unsurprising that the current nostalgic imagination often includes memories of intellectual development and its empowering effects. Such representations not only respond to the assault on education perpetrated by the Franco and Pinochet regimes, but also to the current state of inequitable education in the post-dictatorial aftermath. In the narratives of Almudena Grandes and Roberto Brodsky, characters embrace a view of learning as transformative and collective, occurring through dialogue. They depict education during the Second Republic and the Allende years not as indoctrination, but as a process in which students and educators question alongside one another and gain the critical-thinking tools to grapple with the injustices that hierarchies of power produce. Roberto Bolaño also celebrates the stimulating intellectual environment of the pre-coup Allende years and contrasts it with the un-inspirational present. In Dulce Chacón’s reconstruction of the Ventas women’s prison in 1940s Madrid, characters secretly convert the site into makeshift school and, by extension, transform women’s experiences of political repression into moments of growth and bonding. Given its emphasis on education and the importance of community, unsettling nostalgic fiction and film share common threads with feminist utopian writing. In “Feminism and Utopia,” Alessa Johns contends that “utopias are visions that help to organize and structure present experience and dissatisfaction towards a desireable, workable purpose in the future” (192). Johns outlines the features of feminist utopian writing, including the significance of education, the social construction of identity, the shared approach to power, and a respect for the natural world. While nostalgic desire focuses on the past and utopian thought concentrates on the future, they both hold a vision of collective moral integrity and unity. Just as there is no single kind of nostalgia, there is not one kind of utopian thought. For that reason, the feminist utopian model is particularly relevant when viewed alongside the unsettling nostalgic mode. Both facilitate “the imaginative speculation necessary for generating new liberating strategies” (Johns 176). The theme of clandestine resistance is the third central theme that I have traced in the contemporary nostalgia current. Writers and filmmakers of multiple generations cast a sheen of nostalgia over the pre-coup pasts as well as the years of opposition to dictatorial rule. One remarkable case in point involves the figure of the maquis, or more generally, the rural and urban guerrilla bands of anti-fascist fighters that resisted Franco’s forces. As Rachel Linville correctly argues in her detailed study of decades of depictions of the maquis, Francoist literature and film in the 1940s and 1950s tried to justify both the need for the military coup and the subsequent regime through negative portrayals of the maquis as criminals (Linville 2014). In early postdictatorial fiction and film of the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a shift away from the dehumanizing Francoist narrative. Examples include El corazón del

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bosque (1978) by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Luna de lobos by Julio Llamazaras (1985), and Beltenebros (1989) by Antonio Muñoz Molina. These postdictatorial works critically respond to the Francoist narrative by representing the intolerable conditions that the guerrilla endured to avoid postwar reprisals perpetrated by the civil guard; however, authors and filmmakers render the guerrilla without any nostalgic vindication of their resistance. During the decade that followed, the image of the maquis became a symbol of heroic struggle. That shift also had gendered dimensions. Whereas previously men had appeared as the quintessential resistance fighter, we observe that in the late 1990s writers and filmmakers increasingly worked with survivors and historians to bring unmapped stories of women’s militancy from the margins to the center. Examples of novels and films that focus on the guerrilla in postwar Spain and thereby evince this sway of the cultural imagination include Silencio roto (2000) by Montxo Armendariz based on the novel Maquis (1997) by Alfons Cervera, La voz dormida (2002b) by Dulce Chacón, La guerrilla de la memoria (2002) by Javier Corcuera, El laberinto del fauno (2006) by Guillermo del Toro, and Inés y la alegría (2010) and El lector de Julio Verne (2012) by Almudena Grandes. By using some of these as examples, Linville argues that the evolution of the representation of guerrilla fighters indicates the everchanging political discourse in Spain. The argument that I would like to make is that the reframing of the figure of the maquis is part of a larger fusion of three historical periods (the pre-war, war, and postwar) into one inspirational time of anti-fascist resistance. The violence of the Franco regime is not simply glossed over, but rather it is framed within a nostalgic representation of solidarity, compassion, and courage. We can identify a similar shift of the cultural imagination in recent Chilean novels and films as they bring together memories of the Popular Unity with stories of the underground opposition movements during the dictatorship. Beyond Roberto Brodsky, Carmen Castillo, and Roberto Bolaño, whose works I analyze in this book, we could include in this framework the films Actores secundarios (2004) by Pachi Bustos and Jorge Leiva, Héroes frágiles (2006) by Emilio Pacull, Mi vida con Carlos (2010) by German Berger-Hertz, El edificio de los Chilenos (2010) by Marcarena Aguiló, Michelle (2011) by Rodrigo Díaz, La ciudad de los fotógrafos (2006) and Guerrero (2017) by Sebastián Moreno, Lumi Videla (2017) by Paz Ahumada, and Nostalgia de la luz (2010) by Patricio Guzmán. In the field of literature, a number of authors have cast their gaze on the anti-Pinochet resistance, but Pedro Lemebel stands out for his subtly nostalgic narrative Tengo miedo torero (2001). Set in Santiago in 1986, the novel blends fact and fiction to recount the characters and events surrounding Pinochet's attempted assassination by the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR). Lemebel reflects on how community is forged in adversity through the rendering of a poignant

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relationship between a clandestine Marxist-Leninist revolutionary and a transgender woman in Chile in the mid-1980s. While state repression and militarized masculinity torment the characters in the novel, these challenges foster mutual support and bonding. To understand this change in the cultural imagination, I both draw from and complicate Sara Horowitz’s argument in “Nostalgia and the Holocaust” (2010). She contends that “In the memory narratives of survivors and refugees of the Nazi genocide, the prewar past figures nostalgically” (Horowitz 2010, 49). Her study teases out a set of contradictions that characterize recent memory works in relation to older ones. “Conventionally, nostalgic remembrances gesture toward representations of a golden era (home), followed by catastrophe (separation from or destruction of that home)” (Horowitz 2010, 56). That pattern, Horowitz observes, has shifted in recent texts penned by a younger generation of writers who “collapse home and its destruction into one temporal object of nostalgia, redolent with a sense of loss and incomplete mourning” (Horowitz 2010, 56). We can apply Horowitz’s claims to a range of works in Spain and Chile; however, as I previously explained, the multigenerational makeup of the authors and filmmakers in this book defy generational logic, and by extension, neat integration into the interpretation of postwar nostalgia as exclusively linked to postmemory. If the figure of the disappeared resistance fighter motivates a younger generation to unravel histories that predate their births, then that figure compels an older generation to communicate the knowledge and the emotion that they derive from having witnessed the conditions against which such figures fought. Unsettling Nostalgia will trace the similarities and differences between the nostalgic memories of witnesses, participants, bystanders, victims, and their descendants who connect with their predecessors’ experiences. THE CHAPTERS Interpretations of particular novels and films aim to illuminate the framework that I have presented in the introduction. Instead of reading each literary and cinematic work to fit the theories, I demonstrate how the theories have developed from the texts. I examine similarities and differences between novels and documentaries produced in Spain and Chile from 1996–2012 that problematize reductive views of nostalgia. The examples that I provide allow readers to plot various points on what we can consider a nostalgia spectrum. The seven novels and films analyzed here have been selected to illustrate characteristics related to the concept of unsettling nostalgia, but each one reveals its particular instances. In “Unsettling Nostalgia in Roberto Brodsky’s Últimos días de la historia,” I open with an examination of how cultural critics, authors and activists

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in Chile have contrasted the revolutionary spirit that characterized the Allende years (1970–1973) with the disillusionment of the late 1990s—a period that followed the successful “No” campaign in 1988 but failed to usher in significant structural change. I suggest that the problems facing many leftist groups involving the persistence of impunity, as well as the social despair produced by the neoliberal economic and political model, are manifest in Brodsky’s 2001 novel Últimos días de la historia [Last Days of History]. The author, whose experience of exile in Spain is relevant to this book, invites a consideration of the personal and collective dimensions of nostalgia and its connection to trauma, displacement, return, and alienation. Narrated in the form of a first-person confession, the novel tells the story of Lalo, a middleaged Archeology professor by day and a masked performer in a nightclub by night. Against the backdrop of the transition to democracy in the 1990s, the protagonist stages a show combining camp-style elements of theatricality with an abstract performance of memory that juxtaposes euphoric memories of the pre-coup years with dystopic memories of the 1973 overthrow. Through a close reading of Lalo’s performance and chronicle, which allude to the work of Pedro Lemebel, I argue that self-conscious acts of remembrance at once provide survivors a way of working through trauma and present readers with an account that ventures beyond the Manichean narratives of “official histories” (heroism, winners, losers). Brodsky’s “unsettling nostalgia” strikes a provocative balance between dark social pessimism and the forward-looking belief that radical forms of commemoration might engender further debate about the dangers of forgetting the systematic repression of the Pinochet regime. Memory narratives like Brodsky’s also leave readers with a powerful critique of the tacit consent of many Chileans to accept the patriarchal and neoliberal political-economic model that the regime implemented and ruthlessly upheld. In “Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Calle Santa Fe by Carmen Castillo,” I examine how Chilean women of the radical left remember and narrate their stories of resistance in the wake of the Pinochet regime. I deal specifically with the autobiographical documentary Calle Santa Fe (2007) [Santa Fe Street]by Carmen Castillo and ask how the film represents the lingering recollections of Castillo’s own participation as a proponent of revolutionary social transformation, as well as her traumatic memories of political persecution and exile in France. The film is a hybrid documentary constructed from archival footage, creative reenactments and interviews that take viewers back to the time of Castillo’s forced displacement in Europe to her emotional return to Chile where she exchanges recollections with survivors, family members, and former revolutionaries. Although the film features the testimonies of both men and women, this chapter focuses on women’s voices so as to open up a dialogue not only about the extent to which organizations of the radical left like the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolu-

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cionaria) struggled to move past the gendered structures of a patriarchal society, but also about the clash between the temporalities and affective structures of militancy and post-dictatorial memories. Whereas Castillo-themilitant prioritized political convictions over maternity, the memorialist-director questions those priorities in the present, thus ostensibly re-asserting the gendered role of motherhood that militancy seemed to challenge. In my view, however, this temporal disjuncture does not signal a mere retreat to the patriarchal model, but rather is an attempt to engender a political genealogy that might at once contribute to the process of mourning and animate history for future collective goals. Calle Santa Fe finds its strength not through twodimensional idealizations of resistance fighters, but rather through a nuanced rendering of the emotional landscapes of mothers and daughters whose stories bring out the complexities of historical processes while calling into question the gendered assumptions that shape them. In “Unsettling the Archive: De monstruos y faldas,” I examine how the Barcelona-based Chilean filmmaker Carolina Astudillo uses the experimental documentary form to explore the challenges that anti-fascist women in postwar Spain faced, but also to celebrate the audacity with which such challenges were met. Born in 1975, Astudillo spent her childhood under the Pinochet regime. As a young adult, she moved to Catalonia to study nonfiction film and began her career with the twenty-four-minute piece De monstruos y faldas (Of Monsters and Skirts, 2008) for the Master’s program in creative documentary at the Universitat Antónoma de Barcelona. I argue that Astudillo’s re-contextualization of found footage and archival photographs of the Les Corts Women’s Prison in postwar Barcelona renders visible how the hierarchical militarized state in Spain stemmed from a patriarchal society conditioned by unequal power relations that were reinforced in media outlets. At the same time, De monstruos y faldas nostalgically portrays multiple forms of women’s resistance that have emerged as a response to militaristic patriarchal ideology. Astudillo’s search in film archives is not for revolutionary icons of yesteryear, but for acts of critical consciousness and defiance against the many restrictions that shaped women’s lives within the confines of Francoist military vigilance. The inclusion of Astudillo’s documentary in this book also springs from an understanding of the significance of both her transatlantic trajectory and critical lens that focuses on the past and present in Spain and Chile alike. Her cutting-edge engagement with the histories of the Pinochet and Franco regimes profoundly resonates with the larger claims in Unsettling Nostalgia, which underscore the political, historical, cultural, and artistic connections between these two contexts. Although Astudillo’s films deal with each context separately, they share key thematic threads that reveal her knowledge of the relationships between movements in 1930s Spain and early 1970s Chile to end institutionalized inequality.

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In “Postwar Prison Nostalgia,” I contrast Dulce Chacón’s expression of nostalgia with the others in the book arguing that La voz dormida (The Sleeping Voice) presents a restorative nostalgic intertextual employment of texts and past motifs. The novel offers an entryway to examine the paradoxes of narratives that portray a dystopic period to inform readers about state terror and, at the same time, invite us to imagine a period of unfaltering solidarity and revolutionary commitments. La voz dormida (2002b) is a testimonial inflected narrative that spans the years 1939–1963 and tells the trajectory of a group of communist women who were incarcerated in Madrid’s Ventas prison for their support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. As the title suggests, Chacón seeks to use her narrative as a tool to awaken the “dormant” voices of the past and to unearth memories of state violence. Chacón also looks to the traumatic experiences of women during a time of dictatorial repression as a source of inspiration for cultural regeneration. Through the author’s nostalgic gaze, readers envision female bonding as a powerful act of resistance at a time when bonds among the anti-Franco opposition were meant to be broken. Whereas this paradoxical performance of memory is mitigated by a nuanced treatment of revolution and gender by other authors and filmmakers in this book, Chacón locates dictatorial trauma within a romantic narrative of bygone heroism and sacrifice. This chapter problematizes Chacón’s novel, but it avoids a sweeping dismissal of her work. It suggests that this kind of nostalgia might serve as an antidote that may counter disenchantment and generate interest in the past. Given that Chacón’s novel manifestly energized readers, authors, and political leaders, this chapter considers the role of restorative nostalgia in creating reflection and calling for redress. In “Nostalgia and Inner Exile,” I focus on Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado (The Frozen Heart, 2007) and El lector de Julio Verne (The Reader of Jules Verne, 2012). These novels portray not only alliances forged in adversity, but also social fractures stemming from displacement, betrayal, loss, and gendered repression. Spanning a full century from 1900–2005, El corazón helado (2007) is an epic novel by Almudena Grandes that traces the interlocking stories of two families, one associated with the Franco regime and the other with the Second Republic. The narrative takes readers from a first-person account set in the post-dictatorial present to a third-person account set during the Spanish Civil War and postwar. These temporal shifts and multiple voices allow the author to construct a highly nuanced portrait of the political roots that engendered the Spanish Civil War generation, as well as their progeny. The protagonist discovers his parents’ complicity with the Franco regime and the ideological differences between his father and his paternal grandmother, who died as a political prisoner in a Francoist detention center. His realizations of how his own family both suffered and benefitted from the horrors of Francoist despotism ultimately lead him to seek a

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sense of belonging within a Republican lineage that had been effaced from the family narrative. In “Nostalgia and Inner Exile,” I also examine El lector de Julio Verne, a coming of age story set during the clandestine resistance of 1947–1949 and narrated by Nino, the son of a civil guard. Through the lens of childhood memories, the author envisions radical acts of collective responsibility and resistance to the discrimination of political and cultural “others” and conceives of alternatives to the class and gender hierarchies of Franco’s Spain. Like Chacón’s La voz dormida, El lector de Julio Verne, and El corazón helado show a shift from a focus on the prewar past to a nostalgia for the postwar period. Both authors imbue the experience of political persecution and inner exile with a sense of companionship. Characters come together in their principal opposition to injustice experienced by women and the politically marginalized in National-Catholic patriarchy. But if Chacón renders an unambiguous portrait of political activism, Grandes complicates these experiences to offer greater insight into the challenges posed by political conflict. While upholding a spirit of defiance to nationalist narratives, Grandes communicates the belief that roots are numerous and origin stories are messy. In the final chapter “Detective Pursuits of an Ironic Nostalgic” I analyze how Roberto Bolaño brings together irony, parody, metafiction, and nostalgia in his 1996 novel Estrella distante (Distant Star, 2005a). Memory itself is the subject of interrogation as the reader witnesses how memory is configured and reconfigured in response to evolving historical conditions. The story involves a semi-autobiographical first-person narrator named Arturo B who tries to unravel the circumstances surrounding the murders and exploits committed by the neo-fascist poet Carlos Wieder. Fueling his investigation, I will argue, is the unsettling-ironic nostalgia for the political milieu of the Allende years and the loss of the disappeared individuals that the narrator associates with that epoch. As in the case of Últimos días de la historia, the narrator’s nostalgia largely functions as a response to his own lack of participation and resistance. At every opportunity, the narrator bespeaks his longing to identify with those years, but at the same time, he points to the seams and erasures in his own account as well as those of others. In some ways, Estrella distante is a forerunner for the novels that came later; however, instead of situating it chronologically in the book (preceding Últimos días de la historia) it is placed at the end as it dialogues with the other chapters. By positioning the novel after the others, we can complicate dominant views of nostalgia and imagine a nostalgia spectrum or a “nostalgiascape.” The book begins with multiple representations of unsettling nostalgia then moves to a quintessential restorative nostalgic novel by Dulce Chacón. Rather than end there in a predictable linear fashion, we return to unsettling nostalgia and bring out some of its most unexpected manifestations. Reading Estrella distante after La voz dormida brings out the greatest

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contrast between nostalgias since there is no trace of restorative nostalgia that is not attacked and dismantled though irony and parody. Since the novel follows the semi-autobiographical narrator from Chile to exile in Spain, Estrella distante also encapsulates the transatlantic connections that I trace in the introduction. These narratives allow me to mark various positions on a continuum of popular and academic reception. This corpus represents texts that are canonical and non-canonical. As we know, Roberto Bolaño has become a major international literary figure and most of his novels, including Estrella distante, have been translated into numerous languages. El corazón helado by Almudena Grandes and La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón had a broad popular appeal within Spain and have been translated into English, but have received less international attention in comparison with Bolaño. Significantly contrasting with these three authors, the novels and films of Roberto Brodsky, Carmen Castillo, and Carolina Astudillo are relatively uncharted by academics, and their work is somewhat challenging to obtain even in Chile. With this selection, Unsettling Nostalgia offers an untrodden conceptual approach to the works of established authors as well as emerging writers and filmmakers. This book closes with a story of transatlantic crossings, similar to the way that it opens in the preface. This time the focus is on a woman named Michelle Peña whose image adorns the cover of this book. By briefly examining multiple versions of her family’s struggles that begin in Spain and continue in Chile, I reiterate the value of a connective and intersectional approach to doing memory studies. The final chapter also goes beyond a summary of nostalgia’s heterogeneous nature by pointing to the limitations of this book’s reach. I signal areas where work needs to be done to better understand the process and meaning of nostalgic memorialization after dictatorial repression. As a way to inspire new research, the final chapter posits several unanswered questions that might continue the debate and contribute to a more profound understanding of nostalgia and the larger matter of how Spaniards and Chileans are dealing with the lingering trauma of political terror and the loss of revolutionary horizons in the aftermath of the military regimes. NOTES 1. Kimberlé Crenshaw, lawyer, civil rights advocate and scholar, coined the term “intersectionality.” See “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” (1991). It is now a widely-used foundational term to analyze the interconnected nature of social categorizations and to understand how multiple forms of privilege and marginalization interact. 2. “Vine a España porque quería rendir homenaje a un hombre que también luchó contra el comunismo.”

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3. “Si los comunistas que siempre acechan en la oscuridad no plantean problemas, España llegará a alcanzar grandes metas y ser un país grande como lo fue en el pasado.” 4. Diana Taylor offers an insightful reading of similar processes in Argentina in her book Disappearing Acts (183). 5. “La real para ti no es esa España obscena y deprimente, En la que regentea hoy la canalla, Sino esta España viva y siempre noble, Que Galdós en sus libros ha creado. De aquélla nos consuela y cura ésta” (cited in Grandes 2012). 6. The school textbook El niño republicano (1932), written by Joaquín Seró Sabaté, is one exemplary textbook that imagined a burgeoning revolutionary internationalist republican identity in contrast with the colonialist patriarchal past. It is that pre-dictatorial time-space and its incomplete transformative social and political projects that becomes the impossible homeland in both the exile imagination as well as the late twentieth-century post-revolutionary discourse. 7. Balmes was born in 1927 in Catalonia. In 1939, he fled Spain with his family in the Winnipeg. During the Popular Unity, he supported Allende and later went into exile to France during the Pinochet regime. In 1986, he returned to Chile and in 2012 the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Trujillo Novoa made a documentary about his life titled Balmes: el doble exilio de la pintura (The Double Exile Balmes: Nostalgic Vision in Painting). On the Winnipeg, also see Angelina Vásquez and Manuel Délano. 8. “La vida se fue haciendo con nacimientos y muertes. Pero aprendimos a pertenecer. Fue un ‘descubrimiento’ de América al revés y sin vencedores” (cited in Gálvez Barraza). 9. For more information on the various stages in the development of the museum, see the organizational website for the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (MSSA) [Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende] http://mssa.cl/the-museum-2/ 10. López Quiñones argues, “Todas las esperanzas depositadas por algunos sectores de la izquierda en la muerte del dictador y en algún tipo de ruptura radical se vieron frustradas, en parte por una transición tan rupturista como continuista, y en parte por un contexto generalizado en el que las grandes narrativas revolucionarias y los grandes proyectos transformadores de la izquierda entraron en un claro momento de impasse. Resulta consecuente que, ante la dificultad para elaborar visiones utópicas del futuro, estas últimas encuentren un espacio simbólico en el pasado y en aquellos momentos del pasado que albergaron un potencial transformador” (López Quiñones 2006, 201)

Chapter One

Unsettling Nostalgia in Roberto Brodsky’s Últimos días de la historia

How has the revolutionary climate that characterized the Allende years (1970–1973) in Chile transformed over the past five decades? 1 What distinguishes the Chilean leftist political culture of the twenty-first century from that of the years preceding the Pinochet dictatorship and what social, political, and cultural factors have shaped that difference? In her book When the Romance Ended (2000), Katherine Hite observes, “The contrasts between the Chile of the 1960s and the Chile of today are apparent. Gone are the mass mobilizations in the streets and the calls for revolutionary change” (Hite 2000, 187). Hite demonstrates that the 1997 congressional elections saw a dramatic decrease in voter participation from the unprecedented 90 percent voter turnout in the 1988 plebiscite to end the military dictatorship. As a result of the sharp decline in voter participation, the center-left Coalition government sought to reinvigorate voters by laying out their accomplishments and goals. But, unlike the Popular Unity’s emotionally charged, albeit controversial, electoral victory in 1970, the Concertació n’s success in 2000 was less than euphoric. The center-left candidate Ricardo Lagos won the presidential election by a narrow margin in a final runoff with the ultraconservative neoliberal economist candidate of the Independent Democrat Union Joaquín Lavín. We should recall that Lavín studied economics at the University of Chicago and was also the political editor of the conservative newspaper El Mercurio. A member of the ultra-conservative Opus Dei, Lavín wrote Una revolució n silenciosa in 1988 in support of Pinochet's economic policies. “We broke an authoritarian system,” Lagos had claimed twelve years earlier following the successful “No” campaign in 1988 that ended Pinochet’s fifteen-year rule (Greenwald, 1988). The campaign’s slogan, “Chile, la 53

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alegría ya viene” indeed brought an invigorated sense of hope to a leftist populace scarred by the authoritarian regime. However, throughout the 1990s, the Concertació n failed to remove the impunity of many state agents responsible for human rights crimes and additionally curtailed the demands of torture victims and families of the disappeared. 2 Some observers, such as Tomá s Moulian, call Chile’s transition to democracy a time of forgetting; yet, such an analysis seems to understate the work of artists, workers, students, human rights activists, the press, and many others that refused to allow the process of the transition to go unquestioned. I do, however, support Moulian’s conceptualization of a politics of “whitewashing,” or an effort by the architects of the transition to minimize the victims’ lingering trauma to defend the neoliberal economic project implemented by the regime. Moulian argues, “The whitewashing of Pinochet was a way of acknowledging that his mistake was in his choice of means, but not in the ends which he pursued” (Moulian 1998, 20). Indeed, the Concertació n sought to concentrate on capitalist modernization, which meant a move towards a “pragmatic model of transition as reconciliation which entailed a demand for forgiveness without a complete revelation of the past and acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and without broad access to justice” (Frazier 1999, 107). This form of reconciliation played a key role in the maintenance of the neoliberal political framework, which was conceived of by many of the transition’s architects with a teleological conception of history. Such a conception eluded a critical analysis of the social and political causes and consequences of the military’s usurpation of power and instead sought a justification of the takeover. But the Concertació n’s focus on neoliberal modernization not only entailed soft-pedaling human rights abuses; it also involved an emphasis on consumption and individualism rather than on political mobilization and solidarity. For Moulian, Chilean culture had been significantly depoliticized and “transformed into a bourgeois culture based exclusively on competitive individualism, which encourages disinterest in public affairs through its obsessive ‘me’ culture” (Moulian 1998, 20). Consequently, for many women and men who spent years opposing the military dictatorship, the transition to democracy in Chile was an enormous disappointment. In No Apocalypse, No Integration (2001), Martín Hopenhayn suggests that the cultural and political ethos at the turn of the century in Chile can be characterized by an unresolved tension between “agony and transfiguration” (Hopenhayn 2001, x). 3 That is to say, the cultural climate is charged with a sense of skepticism on one hand, and a hopeful desire to revive the bygone utopist discourses promising progressive change on the other. While Hopenhayen expresses disenchantment with the Marxist model and the Enlightenment’s engines of progress (science, commerce, and government) to yield positive change, he conveys an urgency to resist the forces of integration into the neoliberal

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system. He urges the exploration of discourses of difference, symbolic action, and popular culture that is neither apocalyptic nor integrated (Hopenhayn 2001, 46). How, then, might Chilean authors and artists carve out a space for a creative and constructive nostalgia that draws inspiration from memories of the revolutionary atmosphere of the Allende years and at the same time avoids the deadfalls of indiscriminate idealizations? An interview with the novelist Robert Brodsky (b. 1957) published in 2000 offers a starting point to engage with this question as he reflects on what he views as the most salient consequence of the Pinochet regime. He suggested that the dictatorship transformed the leftist base that remained in Chile from one that believed in the promise of socialist transformation, to one shattered by defeat and regret. “Clinging to the Concertation governments or simply feeling despair in the city, everyone ended up changing their horizon and crying, sometimes, for that solidarity so dear and so dead.” [“Adheridos a los gobiernos de la Concertació n o nada más desamparados en la ciudad, todos terminaron cambiando de horizonte y llorando, a veces, por esa solidaridad querida y tan muerta”] (Brodsky 2000, 10). With this statement Brodsky observes that one of the regime’s most far-reaching legacies was a sense of disenchantment that left many yearning for what he calls that element of solidarity between people and groups (Brodsky 2000, 10). This interview, titled “Today Betrayal Has Become the Norm” (“Hoy la traición se ha vuelto norma”), appeared in El Mercurio after the publication of his first novel El peor de los héroes (1999), a hybrid historical-detective novel that follows a lawyer’s effort to unravel the mysteries of a young man disappeared during the military regime. The author went on to publish Último dias de la historia (2001), El arte de callor (2004), Bosque quemado (2007), El veneno (2012), and Casa chilena (2015) among others. He is also the coscript writer of the feature film Machuca (2004), and the documentary Mi vida con Carlos (2010). While Brodsky’s reflections convey a wistful longing for the past, he simultaneously projects a sense of resistance to accept the Pinochet aftermath. His work ventures beyond the limitations usually associated with melancholia and undertakes an important critique not only of the inability to bring Pinochet and other military officers to justice, but also the contemporary discourse of neoliberal capitalism and national reconciliation whose emphasis is oriented around modernization and individualism and whose premise is to leave the past behind. In this chapter, I examine Últimos días de la historia (2001), a novel that dramatizes the reactions of the generation that transitioned into adulthood during the events surrounding the military coup. The protagonist adopts a nostalgic gaze towards the years of the UP as a response to both the sociopolitical upheaval unfurled by the coup and to his own sense of dejection in the aftermath of the regime. By analyzing plot devices, narrative strategies, and character representations, I argue that the

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text offers us a window to conceptualize an alternative form of nostalgia, “unsettling nostalgia,” that goes beyond its usual meaning as an uncritical idealization of the past that assumes a dichotomy between past and present. Unsettling nostalgia moves us away from that escapist longing for the retrieval of a bygone era and toward questions concerning the interwoven relationship between the emotional, the historical, the political, and the cultural, and how these influence the present. The novel has sixteen untitled chapters, but it could be separated into three historical moments in the narrator’s life; the UP period (1970–1973), the coup d’état and dictatorship (1973–1990) and the postdictatorial present (1996). The novel begins in 1996 behind a curtain at a Santiago nightclub where the main character, Lalo, awaits his moment of appearance on stage. He is a middle-aged professor and father by day and a masked performer by night. What ensues in the bar is an unexpected encounter with Cacho, a onetime friend in the audience who reminds Lalo of who he once was and who he has become. As an adolescent, Lalo was optimistic and unencumbered by the traumatic memories of the military coup. After years of living under the authoritarian regime in an unhappy marriage and an unfulfilling career, he now finds himself unengaged in meaningful relationships. But Lalo also reminds Cacho of his own past. After the coup, he and his family fled into exile, and as a consequence, Cacho severed all emotional ties with both Chile and Lalo. It is no coincidence that he is now part of a team of international experts visiting Chile for a conference on environmental problems in Santiago. Such a detail reminds us of the dregs of capitalist consumption, visible in the sooty pollution that hovers over the capital, and by extension the drawbacks of urban development and modernity. The encounter between these two old friends produces an extended flashback in the form of a first-person confession by Lalo that traces the experiences that shaped his identity. Lalo’s circumstances in the present are juxtaposed with vivid memories of his adolescence during the Unidad Popular, a time in which he discovered both socialist politics and sexual desire. But the excitement of those years was truncated in 1973 with the military coup. He flees to Argentina and lives with relatives in an upscale porteño neighborhood, where he invokes the memory of Allende as a symbol of socialist commitment to a progressive agenda. However, Lalo not only clings to real memories while in exile; he also invents others. His nostalgic stories about his involvement in the construction of the “Vía Chilena al Socialismo” and his subsequent heroic resistance to the military coup are at variance with the reality of his minimal action during and after the coup. On one hand, nostalgia for the protagonist becomes an escape—a panacea for the postcoup ills that allows him to take refuge in the romanticized days of yesteryear while avoiding a confrontation with the present. On the other hand, nostalgia enables the narrator to establish a sense of belonging within a cultural move-

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ment and body politic that Pinochet and his supporters sought to eliminate. According to Stuart Tannock, nostalgia “invokes a positively evaluated past in response to a deficient present world. The nostalgic subject turns to the past to find/construct sources of identity, agency, or community, that are felt to be lacking, blocked, subverted, or threatened in the present” (Tannock 1995, 454). The novel, therefore, stages the multiple functions of nostalgia; it can be both a meaning-providing resource that mitigates traumatic memories as well as a form of escapism. When the protagonist returns home, however, he is not afforded the indulgences of the bittersweet recollections of the Chile that he had imagined through a symbolic return. Soon he finds another escape, this time within the university where his research of prehistoric paintings symbolizes his distance from the recent past. Years later, he orchestrates a cathartic performance with an unusual sex-machine at a nightclub as a political and philosophical response to the aftermath of the regime. With his performance, he not only engages memories of Chile’s recent past, but he also performs and embodies those memories. Nostalgia becomes a performable emotion. His performance can be characterized by what Dominic LaCapra theorizes as “acting out” and “working through.” In Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) LaCapra argues that “working through” entails a necessary critical distance from painful recollections, which might allow the individual to distinguish between past, present and future (LaCapra 2001, 143–44). In contrast, “acting out” involves a fixation with past traumatic experiences whereby the individual relives them in a pattern of repetition and return (i.e., through flashbacks and nightmares). In Representing the Holocaust (1994) LaCapra contends that “acting out” and “working through” are not entirely at odds but can coexist. Lalo’s performance portrays this process of “acting out” and “working through” insofar as he is engaged in a constant repetition of traumatic memories; however, this repetition is not debilitating but rather a way for him to be an ethical and political agent. The performance of memory that Brodsky conceptualizes could be compared to the archaeological excavation that Walter Benjamin describes in “Excavation of Memory” (1932): “He who seeks to approach his buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil” (Benjamin 1999, 576). An analysis of Brodsky’s Últimos días allows us to imagine that process. In what follows, I trace the critical dimensions of nostalgia through a close reading of the protagonist’s performance with the sex machine, a clever plot device. The show, which combines nostalgic memories of the precoup years with dystopic memories of the overthrow, provides a way of working through the past for the fragmented self. I then analyze the protagonist’s flashbacks, which frame emotionally charged memories of the Unidad Popular and the military

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seizure of power. Finally, I discuss the concluding encounter between the main characters. These moments exhibit nostalgia’s evaluative capacity through a critical reflection on the past as well as a perceptive critique of the call for reconciliation and closure without redress. LONGING FOR A “HISTORICAL AWAKENING” As noted, Ú ltimos días opens in a nightclub around 1996, where a diverse group of “Santiaguinos” gathers to drink and watch performances. 4 This crowd includes both Chile’s forty-something generation (born in the mid1950s) that spent their formative years during the Popular Unity government and Chile’s “Generation X” born during the 1970s. While some of the Chilean youths that frequent the bar do not understand Lalo’s performances, many of the spectators accept him and identify with him. Lalo explains: It is true that some are openly gay and others are looking for a bi scene, but most aren’t. They are people who have lost their way, bearing their own withdrawal like an injustice scarred on their faces, like an acceptance of regret that does not know or need revenge any longer. In their grim wisdom, they recognize that they have survived history as they are. They are characters who do not fight or shout beyond the enthusiasm with which they howl at the nightclub. (Brodsky 2001, 126) 5

Brodsky renders two disenchanted generations; one that had dedicated important years of their lives to defeat the Pinochet regime, and another that came into adulthood when Chilean society had already become immersed in an accelerated neoliberal capitalist system. The disenchantment of the former generation was embedded in an understanding of the disparity between the sacrifice put towards the anti-Pinochet resistance and the nominal achievement of reform during the transition. Here we see a salient connection with the post-Franco Spanish context. Jo Labanyi observes, “The left’s desencanto was rooted in an awareness of the discrepancy between the enormous energy invested over the long years of the anti-Franco struggles and the minimal concessions to leveling social and economic reform gained as a result of the transition” (Graham and Labanyi 1995, 313). In Ú ltimos días Brodsky depicts a site that brings together multiple generations and forms of disenchantment. For Chile’s Generation X, disillusionment was arguably a product of the cultural environment of the regime, which was one of censorship, propaganda, secrecy, and neoliberal capitalist culture that emphasized individualism and consumption. What this generation had in common with the 1970s generation during the mid-to-late 1990s was a similar response; a withdrawal from political activism. Hopenhayen observes that “withdrawal, defeatism, demobilization, lack of will power, exacerbated individualism, fear, anguish,

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and cynicism” are all symptoms of a “crisis of utopia” that has produced a “somnambulant” society (Hopenhayn 2001, 143). I agree with Hopenhayen, yet this state should not be confused with a state of amnesia, as Historian Steve Stern argues: Cultural belief by a majority in the truth of cruel human rupture and persecution under dictatorship, and in the moral urgency of justice, unfolded alongside political belief that Pinochet, the military, and their social base of supporters and sympathizers remained too strong for Chile to take logical “next steps” along the road of truth and justice. The result was not so much a culture of forgetting, as a culture that oscillated . . . between prudence and convulsion. (Stern 2004, xxix)

Lalo performs this anxious space between “prudence and convulsion” in Ú ltimos dí as de la historia. What ensues at the nightclub is Lalo’s abstract performance, which blends representations of pivotal moments in Chile’s recent past with intimate, fragmented personal memories of euphoria, defeat, and shame. In the words of Lalo himself, his performance is “un viaje sinóptico sobre las islas de la memoria” (Brodsky 2001, 14) [a synoptic trip on the islands of memory]. He is dressed as a ghost and seeks to conjure repressed memories of trauma and political violence, which continue to haunt the present. Discussing the image of the specter in contemporary Spanish cultural production, Jo Labanyi contends, “The trope of haunting, which elides direct representation of the past in favor of the representation of its after effects, stresses the legacy of the past to the present: a legacy which—as in most ghost stories—is one of injustice requiring reparation” (Labanyi 2007, 113). The phantom trope in Ú ltimos dí as bespeaks the lingering presence of memories of the disappeared and the traumatic events surrounding the military coup. Such events cannot be narrated comprehensively or linearly, but instead represented in discontinuous sketches that blend myth and history, fact and fiction. Lalo’s conceptual performance expresses an awareness of the problematic nature of narratives that seek to represent traumatic experiences in an unruffled account. Moreover, the protagonist’s show appeals to the conventions of oral narrative. More abstract than “fact” oriented, each presentation evokes specific moments in Lalo’s life. Among them, the afternoon of September 11 when he and Cacho watched Pinochet’s Hawker-Hunter jets fly towards La Moneda and the sexual episodes that he once had with Cacho and his sister, Toña. However, in his performance, these sexual episodes involve an elaborate hermaphroditical sex machine adorned with red lights and elastic tubes that insufficiently substitutes his former companions. The sex-machine, which represents technology, modernity, and progress, appears to be designed to fulfill Lalo’s desires to recreate experiences from the past. However, the machine destroys itself after an ejaculation of artificial semen above the

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crowd, suggesting the failure of modernity as well as Lalo’s inability to recuperate the past and establish continuity. As part of a reenactment of September 11, Lalo prompts the crowd to press on the sex machine’s lateral sides to provoke an explosion. Such a collective experience of feverishness, chaos, and claustrophobia seems to be meant to evoke the atmosphere of the coup. Meanwhile, his stagehand controls the machine from backstage and causes it to suddenly discharge a thick stream of white liquid resembling semen from a large red artificial penis. The liquid jets towards a colorful balloon suspended from the ceiling, which bursts open upon impact and showers an assortment of sex toys onto the crowd. Lalo’s show, which combines convulsive memories with a flexible and playful view of erotic desire, can be read as an expression of a queer aesthetics and a vision of sexual liberation. Lalo’s performance rejects both the heteronormative discourse promulgated by the Pinochet regime, which championed the strict binary gender system and a strong emphasis on procreative sex, as well as the current cultural context of the post-dictatorship. Of course, the marginalization of the underground bar is revealing of the society in which the protagonist lives, where full legal recognition of samesex couples and anti-discrimination laws were nonexistent. Adult, consensual, same-sex sexual activity was illegal in Chile until 1999, and it was a change implemented only after intense struggle. Looking back before the Pinochet regime, the disciplining of sexual “others” was an integral component of the conservative program of Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, a military dictator who ruled from 1927–1931 and again from 1952–1958. The Ibáñez dictatorship was responsible for raids, arrests, imprisonment and the execution or disappearance of gay men. As Lessie Jo Frazier points out in Salt in the Sand, the Pisagua prison that kept political prisoners out of sight during the Pinochet regime had a long history as a sexual “correction” center for gay men, namely under the Ibá ñez del Campo regime (Frazier 2007, 168). That continuity remains underexamined as only a small number of authors, among them Pedro Lemebel, have discussed the repression of gay men and transgender people in Pisagua. Today, nearly two decades after the 2001 publication of Últimos días, LGBT rights in Chile are still limited. While Brodsky does not explicitly reference these histories, he engages the question of sexuality in his critique of the Pinochet regime and the ongoing existence of repression of sexual “others” in the post-dictatorial present. The machine’s masturbatory ejaculation into the air can also be read as a quickly dissipating moment of pleasure or symbolically as the end of the short-lived Popular Unity years. While the Popular Unity failed to embrace the LGBT liberation movements, the UP years became a time in which many marginalized groups began to demand equal rights in the larger processes of social change. It was an uneven process, for instance, the leftist press Clarín,

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(referenced in the prologue), used a homophobic discourse to insult rightwing political candidates and published reports that characterized gay men as “locas” or “yeguas.” Against that backdrop, in early 1973 the first openly gay march took place in Santiago in the Plaza de Armas. In contrast with the political horizons represented by the demonstration, Pinochet’s patriarchal rhetoric, which emphasized heteronormative sexuality, conformity, patriotism, and economic ascension, fomented an environment that epitomized political repression and cultural regression. That makes all the more valiant the creative and disruptive interventions by groups like Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse), formed in 1987 by Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas. As evident in their name, the group reclaimed and subverted homophobic and religious ideologies by performing and rendering visible trans and non-heteronormative identities that continued to be marginalized even by leftist opponents of the dictatorship. That context is brilliantly captured in the novel Tengo miedo torero by Lemebel, which was also published in 2001. In Últimos días Brodsky alludes to these histories in vignettes. His use of Hadean motifs (the subterranean bar and Lalo’s role as a ghost) symbolizes an ironic twist that mocks the Pinochetistas’ claim that the military coup saved Chile from so-called moral decay and chaos. The sex toys showered onto the Chilean public could be read as a representation of collective sexual freedom, or conversely as a sign of individual pleasure, perhaps signaling to the solipsism, narcissism, and consumerism promoted by the market-driven economy implemented by the regime. Therein lies the complexity of Brodsky’s Últimos días. After each performance, which Lalo presents every weekend, eight times a month, the sex machine destroys itself. As symbolized in the wreckage, Lalo’s desire to create an authentic representation of his past experiences, and therefore work through them, is ultimately a chimera. Despite the futility of his attempts, however, Lalo continuously reconstructs the machine for his next performance. His fruitless search for meaning in the face of an absurd world is reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (1942). Camus juxtaposes the absurdity of modern life with the life of Sisyphus, a figure of Greek mythology condemned by Zeus for his craftiness to incessantly repeat the same inconsequential task of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to see it rumble down again. But Camus concludes that he would like to imagine Sisyphus happy. The existence of Sisyphus, like that of the narrator in Brodsky’s Últimos días, is tragic when he fixedly gazes back at the life that he was forced to abandon. When he focuses on the task at hand (the performance of memory), rather than the desire to return, he might possibly find some semblance to joy. What the protagonist arguably seeks to instigate with his performance is what Benjamin has termed in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings a “historical awakening” (Benjamin 1978, 162). As such, the

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goal of Lalo’s performance is to galvanize the audience and to compel them to think critically about the relationship between the past dictatorship and the present post-dictatorship. The production, then, becomes a symbolic action that is “neither apocalyptic nor integrated” to use Hopenhayen’s terminology. It is one that projects memories of political violence into a public space within which individuals with diverse backgrounds and generational claims might engage in debates about the recent past and its legacy. Rather than profess to resolve the crisis of utopia, the protagonist seeks to produce what Hopenhayen calls a “mobilizing effect of shaking up the gregarious skepticism that has spread out under the eaves of the crisis” (Hopenhayen 2001, 143). Benjamin’s critique of modern progress is explicit in Lalo’s conceptualization of his performance. In an interview, a journalist questions Lalo’s intentions and insinuates that the show was not “una propuesta dramática” [a dramatic proposal] but rather “la sórdida aventura de un lunático avejentado” [the sordid adventure of an aged lunatic] (Brodsky 2001, 122). In response, Lalo sustains that he is not a second-rate stripper but rather an artist and his motivation is not to titillate but to teach: “I consider myself an artist, I told him, someone who interprets for others, and also a pedagogue. . . . what motivates me is the decay of our perception. My show is not more than that: a crystal ball turned towards the past” (Brodsky 2001, 123). 6 The continuities between the dictatorship and the postdictatorship and the consequent lack of historical reflection are at the heart of his critique. He proceeds to make a direct reference to Benjamin as he points to “Benjamin’s little book” (Brodsky 2001, 123). We can imagine that the little book is Benjamin’s frequently cited Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), a work that elaborates a critique of the notion of “historical progress.” Inspired by a drawing by Paul Klee (1879–1940) called “Angelus Novus,” Benjamin describes an angel of history whose eyes point toward the right, while the rest of the body is turned leftward, suggesting thwarted movement or a conflict between past and future. Benjamin writes that the angel sees in the past, one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage on wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence and the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Benjamin 1968, 257)

Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus” recalls Hegel’s allegorical “Owl of Minerva”—the Roman goddess of wisdom who spreads her wings only at nightfall, representing the notion that only hindsight enables comprehension of the past. Benjamin’s metaphor additionally serves to criticize the teleological

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view of history that all events stem from a linear cause and effect relationship, and that the sequence of events together amounts to “progress.” Benjamin observes the disenchanted present and challenges the prophets of the Enlightenment that ground a conception of utopia on a teleological understanding of time. In Últimos días, Brodsky alludes to Benjamin’s angel to articulate a response to the justifications of Pinochet’s usurpation of power and the triumphalist claims that the regime’s neoliberal program was historically necessary. In his performance, the protagonist of Últimos días physically embodies an angel (or devil) of history who attempts to haunt the public and to salvage fragments from the past. Nevertheless, as we observe through the journalist’s cynicism, Lalo lacks a receptive social space and wider public that allows itself to be haunted by unsettling memories of the past. The only space where the protagonist’s counterhegemonic poetic discourse might encounter an authentic reverberation is in a counter-culture nightclub. Perhaps what we can conclude is that Lalo’s performance of memory, which combines mourning for the regime’s victims with a political protest, exemplifies both the radical courses of action as well as the limitations of cultural resistance in the post-dictatorial present. NOSTALGIA FOR A LOST CULTURAL AND POLITICAL MILIEU Lalo’s performance incorporates recorded music, a spectacle of lights, and video clips to narrate unchronological memories of a traumatic past. This nonlinear narrative approach highlights the incomprehensibility of the regime’s violence and undermines Pinochet’s official discourse of order and reason. In contrast with this narrative strategy, Lalo’s first-person confession recounts emblematic events in chronological order, which begin with Allende’s electoral victory in 1970. The narrator’s reflections upon his present (1996) constantly insert themselves onto his memories of the past. For instance, when the narrator explores memories of the bombing of La Moneda, he suddenly shifts to a reflection on his performance in which he represents those experiences. These fluid temporal shifts accentuate the past’s continuous influence upon the present. History in the novel is not a distant settled narrative, but rather, an open contentious debate that always impinges upon the present. Central to Lalo’s flashback of his formative years is the relationship between memory and identity (political, cultural, religious, and sexual). Lalo is the grandson of both middle-class, nonpracticing Catholic Chileans on his mother’s side, and Ukrainian communist Jewish immigrants that escaped the Ukrainian pogroms during the first decades of the century on his father’s side. After Pinochet’s military coup—which was shot through with anticommunism and anti-Semitism—Lalo begins to identify with his grandfather

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who went into exile first in Argentina and later in Chile under threat of systematic religious and ethnic persecution. In addition, the author accounts for the complexities of sexual identity through the protagonist. That is to say, it is unclear if he identifies as heterosexual, bisexual, or gay. This multifaceted characterization demonstrates that the author does not work with categories of identity in isolation or through a binary perspective. Questions of gender, ethnic, religious, political, and sexual identity are interwoven. Brodsky’s portrait of Lalo serves to show how subordination in the context of the Pinochet regime cannot be adequately understood without paying attention to the intersections of identity. The first half of the flashback frames nostalgic memories of sexual experimentation, collective solidarity, and revolutionary dreams, while the second half of the flashback renders a time of social upheaval that produced fear and a sense of alienation. Brodsky conceives of the 1973 military coup as a disruption in time that signaled a “before” and an “after.” The overthrow was “a dislocation of time, a division between a before and after, a rupture that has completely served the present, which is now skewed as a mere symbol of supreme conquest” (Brodsky 2001, 97). 7 This fragment, as well as the title, engages Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which the political economist triumphantly contends that the end of the Cold War proved that the struggle between ideologies had come to an end, with the world choosing liberal democracy as opposed to socialism. As Frazier points out, on his 1992 visit to Chile, Fukuyama “praised Chile’s economic development as ‘extraordinary’ because it led to the ‘autolegitimation’ of the market” and claimed that “Chile was an example of the greater possibilities for economic growth under authoritarian governments than under democratic regimes” (Frazier 2007, 247). Insofar as Últimos días doubts the possibility of a quickly approaching undoing of capitalism through its own destructive evolution, one could argue that Brodsky inadvertently sustains Fukuyama’s hypothesis. But unlike Fukuyama, Brodsky mourns neoliberalism’s conquest and renders the so-called end of history not positively, but rather as a time when a progressive socialist project was replaced with a culturally regressive and politically repressive regime upheld by censorship, exploitative low wages, and social inequalities. Further, the author refuses to assume a nihilistic position but instead advocates symbolic action that, to use Hopenhayen’s terms, is “neither apocalyptic nor integrated” (Hopenhayn 2001, 46). The contrast between the “before” and “after” is evident in a scene in which the narrator remembers the building for the UNCTAD (The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). The building was constructed when the Popular Unity government was invited in 1971 to host the conference, thus making it a site of collaborative mobilization and socialist politics. In a colossal effort supported by thousands of volunteers, the site was finished in less than one year. As Frank Mora observes, “The UNCTAD

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in Santiago in 1971 ratified the policy of creating a wider international forum in which developing countries would be able to formulate alternatives to the hegemonic vision of the United States” (Mora 2003, 249). In April 1972, Allende gave a compelling address in the building of the UNCTAD on trade, debt, and economic development issues, in which he denounced the exploitation of an unjust trade system and singled out the United States as perpetrators of an, “unfair international division of labor, based on a dehumanized concept of mankind” (Allende Gossens 2000, 25). Once the events concluded, the building was to be administered by the Ministry of Public Education and used for meetings to benefit the public. It was renamed the “Centro Cultural Metropolitano Gabriela Mistral” [The Gabriela Mistral Metropolitan Cultural Center] and became an active center for various artistic and cultural activities for approximately one year. The building was a utopian space created in concert with a conscientious plan to advance social justice and cultural exchange. What the novel renders visible is the site’s transfiguration after the coup into a bastion of the military regime. What readers cannot envision based on the text is the change that would come after its publication. During the presidential term of Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010 and 2014–2018), the building was once again transformed and finally inaugurated in 2010 as the Centro Cultural Gabriela Mistral GAM devoted to disseminate and promote the performing arts and music. In Últimos días, the narrator wistfully recalls his participation in the construction of the building during the Allende years; “I enjoyed doing it. Raising that massive building with our own hands, working overtime day and night, while Allende rallied us not to give up the battle, to double down and stay vigilant, to organize and support the government” (Brodsky 2001, 56). 8 Twenty-five years later, as the protagonist passes the building he silently thinks to himself, “I am glad that I participated in its construction. . . . That building contains all the political experience that I have or of which I was capable” (Brodsky 2001, 56–57). 9 According to Katherine Hite, for the Chilean generation of the 1960s, “the most salient indicators of political identity were their early experiences in national politics, experiences that seared their memories and defined their political priorities and relationships to politics in unique ways” (Hite 2000, xv). For Lalo, the touchstone of his political identity was this first experience, which remained in his memory and determined his political commitments. To Lalo’s disappointment, after the coup the building underwent radical transformation and became a militarized site. Pinochet usurped Allende’s position in the building, later renamed it after the conservative statesman Diego Portales (1793–1837), and finally replaced the discourse of socialism and collective solidarity with the discourse of capitalist enterprise and privatization. After the return to democracy, the building remained in the hands of the Ministry of Defense; however, in 2006, five years after the publication of

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Últimos días, a fire caused by the overheating of the electrical network severely damaged the building. The destruction generated a debate about the revamping of the structure to make way for a new center, including a theatre, convention halls, and restaurants. As I mentioned, during Bachelet’s two non-consecutive terms, the building was once again transformed and finally inaugurated in 2010 as the GAM. While the reclamation of the building attests to the political significance of the site and the social and political changes in the country, any recovery seemed far from reach at the time that Brodsky wrote Últimos días in 2001. The building had the potential to be a site of memory, but the protagonist laments that no one seemed to remember or care about its origins: That building reveals the place that we occupy in history. That is what I shout out when I am feeling enthusiastic, although my students don’t appreciate it because nothing interests them less than the history of the construction of UNCTAD, and how it was renamed Diego Portales and then Gabriela Mistral and tomorrow who knows. Maybe they will decide to leave it in anonymity as a synthesis of the last thirty years, the mirror of the country where I look at myself without recognizing what I see. (Brodsky 2001, 57). 10

The building serves as both a physical vestige of Chile’s recent past and a mirror in which the narrator sees his own reflection. This mournful rendering of the building for the UNCTAD explores how memory and forgetting permeate public spaces and individuals. In his book Present Pasts (2003), Andreas Huyssen reads “cities and buildings as palimpsests of space” and “monuments as transformable and transitory” (Huyssen 2003, 7). The trope of the palimpsest is useful in my reading of this passage because what Brodsky underscores is that edifices and communal areas continue to be effaced in Chile to make room for new meanings, but the multiple layers of the past remain shrouded underneath. The narrator’s gaze back at the building once again reminds us of Benjamin’s angel of history that looks to the past and sees the mounting wreckage, yet a storm called “progress” inevitably drives him towards the future. Brodsky foregrounds the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition to democracy by suggesting that the regime dismantled the Popular Unity’s socialist project and silenced the opposition, whose voices and counterhegemonic memories remain largely shut out because they challenge the current discourse of political reconciliation. Brodsky seeks to vindicate the memory of those spaces and individuals that continue to be marginalized. The building for the UNCTAD becomes a space that produces both nostalgia and melancholy in the narrator because it represents the depletion of a hopeful cultural milieu as well as the loss of the naiveté of his adolescence. While he seeks to keep the building’s memory alive through a transgenerational transmission to his students, they only express indifference. Brodsky’s ren-

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dering of modern Chilean youth and the contemporary classroom experience contrasts greatly with his representation of the utopian precoup classroom— one that provided the protagonist with the opportunity for inspirational learning experiences. During the years of the UP, Lalo learned that education could foster more egalitarian forms of social organization based on democratic decision-making and a commitment to the collective. These principles were taught to Lalo by his high school teacher Nieves Croix, who lives in his memory surrounded by the reverberations of her teachings. Along with Allende, she is a larger-than-life figure of the Popular Unity years who invokes the imagery of a heroine committed to political reform. She taught Social Studies comparing the importance of Marx in the twentieth century with that of Jesus in ancient Rome (Brodsky 2001, 100). Croix becomes a hagiographic character that embodies courage and altruism. Her name significantly connotes purity (Nieves) and martyrdom or crucifixion (Croix). Her character is reminiscent of the real U.S. born priest Father Gerardo Whelan, who was the headmaster of the integrated school St. George in Santiago from 1969–1973. Significantly, Father Gerardo Whelan was the real figure from which Roberto Brodsky and André s Wood modeled the character Father McEnroe in the film Machuca (2004). In the original, the author frames the character as female, and in doing so, recognizes the role women played in political mobilization and in fostering the development of critical consciousness. One of the most vivid memories of the protagonist’s teenage years is the day that Croix brought the students to the settlement “Lo Hermida” on the far west periphery of Santiago. The arrival at the shantytown made Chile’s unequal distribution of wealth and conflictive class relations sharply visible for Lalo and his classmates. Walking among improvised dwellings made from scrap plywood and corrugated metal was the protagonist’s first engagement with settlement dwellers. He recalls how Croix enthusiastically told the class as they returned to the bus that individual effort was not enough to overcome poverty: “no single achievement could free this land of shantytowns, and for that reason the people of Lo Hermida had no alternative but to organize themselves and take poverty into their own hands, and that is the beginning of the class struggle.” (Brodsky 2001, 102). 11 Lalo remembers that in an epiphanic moment he realized that, “poverty was a curse, a stigma that wasn’t merely washed away with good intentions, but rather by grinding it against itself” (Brodsky 2001, 101–2). 12 The author frames the narrator’s memories as a social awakening in which he begins to value Leftist ideals, solidarity, and activism. Here, Brodsky juxtaposes a bygone period of utopian desires with a current period of apathy, moral decay, and disillusionment. Insofar as the author emphasizes an irrevocable loss of the socialist project of the Unidad Popular, the novel manifests a “restorative” nostalgic tendency. According to Svetlana

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Boym, restorative nostalgia focuses on an idea of truth and the return to idealized origins: “Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (Boym 2001, xviii). Restorative nostalgia ruminates on the lost physical and spiritual home and depends on a strong rhetoric of continuity with the historical past. Boym contends that this type of nostalgia “builds on the sense of loss of community and cohesion and offers a comforting script for individual longing” (Boym 2001, 42). Based on the characterization of Nieves Croix, one might conclude that Brodsky is a restorative nostalgic; however, such a conclusion would fail to take into consideration the complexities of the entire novel, which reveal contrasting types of nostalgia that often overlap, shift, and collide. Numerous moments in the novel demonstrate a resistance to the romanticizing character of restorative nostalgia. First, let us consider the characterization of the protagonist during the Popular Unity years. In a self-effacing tone, the narrator admits that his own political dedication was minimal. “I had trouble remembering the acronyms and knowing what the JAP, CUP, JOTA, and FER corresponded to. The FER were the most revolutionary, the ones with whom Toña’s group organized, raising their fists to the cry, “study, fight, and win” (Brodsky 2001, 55). 13 While he could recite several stanzas from the hymn of the Unidad Popular “El pueblo unido,” he confesses that his commitment was limited to a few days of volunteer work with Cacho to construct the building for the UNCTAD. This representation portrays Lalo as a follower who ideologically transforms in relation to those around him due to a longing for acceptance, prestige, and perhaps sexual advance. In another representative scene, Toñ a offers Lalo the novel Palomita blanca (1971), by Enrique Lafourcade expecting to later discuss with him the class conflict as revealed through the plot and main characters. Enormously popular in Chile at the time, the novel depicts a relationship between a working-class young woman (María, Palomita) who falls in love with a young man from the upper-class elite (Juan Carlos). As a means to impress Toña, who becomes the focus of his sexual desire, he attempts to read the novel. However, after skimming over the first few pages, he instead decides to watch the Hollywood series “Run for Your Life” starring Ben Gazzara, who significantly portrays a man with only a short time to live. The theme of the series suggests that Lalo is aware of the gravity of the sociopolitical situation in Chile in 1973, but he would rather remain uncommitted and even ready to retreat. This characterization of the protagonist seeks to make visible the often-guarded antiheroic stories of ambivalence and remorse. This vivid example illustrates how the author encourages readers to gain a more nuanced understanding of the broad spectrum of actors and diverse experiences in this complex historical moment.

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LONGING FOR RESISTANCE The protagonist’s flashbacks include emblematic memories of the coup, such as the afternoon that he watched in horror as the flames scorched La Moneda. “I felt an immobilizing sensation that has lasted until today, as if a mirror had shattered, as if the TV screen were to break apart once again in the middle of an episode of Combat and the shards shot around the room among suffocation and confusion” (Brodsky 2001, 87). 14 The symbolism of this catastrophic version of events is striking: Lalo’s identity, as represented by the mirror, was forever shattered by this experience of collective devastation. 15 As Lalo listens to Allende’s final address to the Chilean people on Radio Magallanes, he knows that Allende’s dream of large open promenades and the future of free humankind was quickly becoming petrified. He laments that Allende was already marble when they listened to him (Brodsky 2001, 91). The marble image of Allende, and by extension, his promise, can be read as a symbol of the fossilization of a dream. This scene renders a traumatized individual that suffers damage to the basic structures of the self due to experiences of fear, humiliation, helplessness, and guilt. The stages of recovery, according to psychologist Judith Herman, are establishing safety, reconstructing the story, making meaning of the present in light of the past, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community (Herman 1997, 3). In the novel, September 11 becomes a point of rupture that marks the beginning of a long process by which the protagonist takes shelter in romanticized memories of the UP while steering clear of the challenges that leftist communities faced after the coup. Lalo remembers that immediately, Allende “transformed into an ideal, that is, into something eternal that demanded to be considered without ambiguity” (Brodsky 2001, 91). 16 This is precisely the type of facile nostalgia that Stuart Tannock, David Lowenthal, and Fredric Jameson criticize as a kind of tranquilizer with debilitating consequences. According to Tannock, this type of uncritical nostalgic “will inevitably gloss over contradictions or negative components” of the past (Tannock 1995, 457). However, what is illuminating is the way in which Brodsky underscores how nostalgic memories are constructed and narrated. That is to say, the author depicts a character whose retrospective ruminations on the past reveal the process by which restorative nostalgic memories tend to romanticize the past and construct a single, coherent, idealized plot. Therefore, by signaling the process, Brodsky makes evident the coexistence of nostalgia, irony, and critical thought. As literary critic Michael Lazzara points out, “One of the particularities of exile is that it is often lived as a freezing in time. Even though life continues in the country from which the individual was cast out, the patria is harbored mentally as a snapshot of the past” (Lazzara 2009, 54). In the protagonist’s case, this frozen record is full of exciting and romantic moments that he

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increasingly embellishes with time. Upon his departure for Buenos Aires in 1974, Lalo admits, “I became committed to the entertaining game of inventing myself” (Brodsky 2001, 109). 17 Lalo fashions himself to his new Argentine friends as a revolutionary intellectual that actively participated in the utopian construction of “la Vía Chilena al Socialismo.” In the following, Lalo creates a formulaic and overtly melodramatic image of yesteryear as an inspirational ideal within the present: I even gave myself a nickname for my revolutionary role, Palo Blanca, the intellectual of the group, and such was the enthusiasm of my speech that sometimes my listeners became electrified between proclamations and promises to prepare to liberate a piece of territory. All along, their voices raised, echoing of the battle of Chacabuco, until we ended up standing on the tables, singing in chorus: Chilean brother / do not lower the flag / we are here willing to cross the mountain range. In front of the stoic waiters, who forgave us for our drunkenness, we were euphoric and in love. (Brodsky 2001, 111) 18

Lalo’s restorative nostalgic discourse, both revolutionary and messianic, is juxtaposed against his cowardly and hypocritical actions. The improvised selection of the nickname Palo Blanca, a shortened version of Palomita Blanca, is both revealing and comical. In this scene, Brodsky insightfully illustrates how restorative nostalgics can be both despairing sentimentalists and disingenuous opportunists. Lalo’s residence in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, “La Recoleta,” epitomizes his hypocrisy. In a guilt-ridden tone, the narrator admits that while he spent his afternoons in posh cafes and tango bars such as “El Querandí” or “La Puerto Rico,” he created a self-acclaiming myth: I circulated my story from café to café, and very soon the city was transformed into my den or, rather, my lecture hall. I got to know each of its corners as if it were a lover, waking up in parks with black cigarette butts in my mouth, divulging the details and combining their possibilities, narrating events, and adding subtleties for the occasional attentive listener who was influenced by the breaking news, which made my story even more essential and necessary since darkness often overshadowed the incoming information. (Brodsky 2001, 113) 19

We might suggest that the narrator’s nostalgia is a logical response to a sense of discontinuity. Tannock suggests that by returning in vision to lost pasts, places, and peoples, the nostalgic subject “asserts a sense of continuity over and above her sense of separation, and from this continuity may be able to replenish a sense of self, of participation, of empowerment, belonging” (Tannock 1995, 456). In this case, the narrator’s nostalgia allows him to establish a sense of community, but it is superficial and fleeting. His championing of the cause of the UP is ultimately self-righteous and opportunistic. It is a

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means among other means (drinking, frequenting cafes) to an end, that of self-fulfillment. Therefore, when Lalo returns to Chile, and his commitment to the anti-Pinochet struggle is challenged, the outcome of that test comes as no surprise. Rather than insert himself into a clandestine resistance movement, he withdraws into silence and inaction, no longer emphasizing a false version of a past. He assumes an ostensibly proper married life and, as I stated, becomes a professor of prehistoric art. His focus on a distant past bespeaks a desire to evade the chafed memories of a recent past. The theme of false heroism is an important thread in the novel. The protagonist houses a sense of guilt for his lack of a deeper engagement in the resistance against the Pinochet regime. According to Herman, “Feelings of guilt are especially severe when the survivor has been a witness to the suffering or death of other people. To be spared oneself, in the knowledge that others have met a worse fate, creates a severe burden of conscience” (Herman 1997, 54). Years after returning from exile, Lalo realizes that his life had been lived in denial and it is only a matter of time before he becomes overwhelmed with a sense of self-loathing. This state of grief and revelation is provoked by a variety of factors, namely the death of his father, the separation from his wife, middle age, and finally, the transition to democracy. It is an emotional state in which he searches for traces of fulfillment but finds none. His previous inspiring speeches in exile appear to have been devoid of any true value. This crossroads in the narrator’s trajectory harks back to the epigraph of Últimos días in which Brodsky cites Nunca llegará s a nada (1961) by the Spanish author Juan Benet (1927–1993): No doubt a day dawns when . . . the past emerges in a moment of uncertainty to exorcise the evil and sordid past and bring back serenity. It ridicules and disrupts the fragile and sterile, chimerical and unsatisfied condition of a tortured and aimless present, eternally absorbed in the flight of a fly buzzing around a green tulip. (Benet cited in Brodsky 2001, 9) 20

Both Últimos días and Nunca llegarás a nada revolve around protagonists tormented by their past and by the experience of failure within the context of dictatorship. The transatlantic comparison is significant. In both cases, memories surface involuntarily within the context of an unsatisfactory present. However, in both cases, the authors do not emphasize the distance of the past, but instead its perpetual return in the present. This pivotal moment in Lalo’s life marks the beginning of his transformation in which he assumes a nocturnal double-life. This transformation does not signal the culmination of a moral defeat, but rather an urgency to convey an anti-hegemonic discourse that highlights the ways in which the military coup impacted his life. Lalo conceives of the sex machine through the discovery of the real Hungarian author and inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen (1734–1804), who

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created a false automated chess-playing machine in 1769 called “The Turk.” Von Kempelen’s automaton reflected the dreams of living machines, consisting of a life-sized model of a bearded Turkish man whose left arm held a smoking pipe, while his right arm rested on the top of a large wooden box and played the opponent. It was a facade since inside the box a human chess expert controlled the machine and created the illusion that it was the Turk who was competing. After the death of its inventor in 1804, the life-imitating machine was sold to the Bavarian musician Johann Nepomuk Mä lzel, who hired the chess player William Schlumberger to carry out the hoax from within the box. In Lalo’s own words, the sex machine would be his partner with whom he would journey through the corners of memory: “Travel the towns and cities of memory . . . to represent my truth in history” (Brodsky 2001, 118). 21 Significantly, Benjamin commented on Von Kempelen’s mechanical device in his “Theses of the Philosophy of History.” In the first thesis written in 1940, Benjamin uses the automaton as a metaphor: “One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” (Benjamin 1968, 253). In Benjamin’s metaphor, theology’s faith (as opposed to secularism’s reason) is the cloaked force behind historical materialism (the man-made automaton), which is framed to be singlehandedly capable of winning the class struggle. Benjamin’s use of The Turk could be read as a critique suggesting that despite Marxism’s identification with scientific objectivity, historical materialism requires quasi-religious mechanisms or means to succeed. Benjamin’s metaphor might be read as a rejection of historical materialism as illusory or even fraudulent; however, in the book Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's ‘On the Concept of History’ the French-Brazilian Marxist sociologist and philosopher Michael Löwy makes a convincing argument that “The use of quotation marks and the way this is phrased suggest that this automaton is not ‘true’ historical materialism, but something that is given that name.” (2005, 25). 22 The allusion to Benjamin’s metaphor in Últimos días is provocative and enigmatic. Insofar as the sex machine (Lalo’s Turk) explodes and symbolically dies at the end of each show, we might imagine that Lalo’s show is a parallel version of Brodsky’s narrative. It deconstructs grand narratives, unveiling their construction and illusory mechanisms. At the same time, it mourns the loss of the match or the faith in a utopist revolution that would radically reshape social relations. Lalo is an illusionist who exposes his tricks, inviting his public into a partnership that disallows for the blind confusion between the blemished reality and the grandiose myth. This interpretation dovetails well with Lalo’s description of the machine as the “Deus ex machine,” but “rebajada” and “ensordecida” (“diminished” and “deafened”; Brodsky 2001, 123). The “Deus ex machine” is a plot device that is unex-

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pectedly introduced in a narrative and provides a tidy solution to a far more complex problem to bring the story to a happy ending. If Lalo’s sex machine is the subversive version of the “Deus ex machine,” then his robot is a device that does not offer climatic resolutions, but rather, the antithesis. The explosion of the false android, and by extension the performance’s decidedly unhappy ending, allows Brodsky to express both a sense of disappointment in the loss of the socialist revolution and a critique of the Concertació n’s toothless effort to attain justice in the transition to democracy. As I previously noted, Lalo’s performance of memory has a powerful political message. However, it is evident that Brodsky intends this show, which combines camp-style elements of theatricality and exaggeration, to be viewed with a certain measure of humor. These elements of melodrama and comedy serve to heighten the desperate search for new ways to talk about the violence perpetrated by the regime. It is noteworthy that the protagonist’s use of montage alludes, if not ironically, to Diamela Eltit’s conceptual performance “Maipu” (1983), whereby the avant-garde artist projected her face onto walls opposite a brothel in Santiago while she read an excerpt of her most abstract novel Lumpé rica. The idea, similar to Lalo’s performance, was to unsettle the public and bring them into a critical state of reflection. Academics lauded Eltit’s performance, but the wider public arguably misunderstood it. Through the “Maipu” allusion, Brodsky seems to self-consciously comment on the extent to which the significance of Lalo’s project, and by extension the entire novel, lies in its theoretical claims. UNSETTLING NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE In a criticism of the dominant narrative of reconciliation in Chile, Frazier argues, “Reconciliation in transitions to democracy is often understood as a form of mourning in which ‘truth commissions’ document human rights abuses of prior regimes so that the nation may confront and confirm its loss, resign its pain, and move on” (Frazier 1999, 110). But, as Frazier subsequently suggests, perhaps moving on is an impossible endeavor, particularly when justice has been denied. This is ultimately the question that Brodsky poses to the reader at the end of the novel. In the penultimate scene, which reconnects with the beginning of the novel, the coup’s long-lasting effects becomes the topic of conversation when Cacho and Lalo are reunited. After twenty-two years of separation, the friends engage in a discussion about the past as they walk through Santiago’s deserted streets. Significantly, they stop at “La Casa de Cena,” a bohemian restaurant located near the old building of the UNCTAD. Returning from exile, Cacho finds himself in a different Chile, one that inevitably perturbs him. Over the years, memory became for Cacho what Steve Stern calls a “closed box,” or a “‘will to forget,’ a social

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agreement that some themes and some remembrances were so explosive— conflictive and intractable—that little could be gained from a public opening and airing of the contents inside” (Stern 2004, 89). Nevertheless, Cacho’s visit confirms the persistence of memory. “Returning to Santiago meant exposing himself to a regression, and it was evident that he regretted it . . . despite the twenty-something years since the Costa family left, Cacho wasn’t able to close that door swinging open behind him” (Brodsky 2001, 132). 23 Through the juxtaposition of these characters, Brodsky attempts to say something about the laborious nature of overcoming trauma and loss. As they leave the restaurant, Lalo suddenly needs to vomit, which symbolizes his inability to digest the painful memories evoked by the encounter. The novel ends with a somber image of the protagonist alone and disillusioned. He contemplates whether or not he should return to the bar in search of old incurable wounds. He concludes that returning is inevitable; “That would be my test or my debt, although at that moment another night of farewells seemed impossible” (Brodsky 2001, 147). 24 The sorrow that he transmits causes us to reflect on the unresolved and uncalculatable grief produced by the injustices of the regime. In 2017, sixteen years after its original publication through the small press Ojo por Ojo, Últimos días was republished in Mexico by Rialta. The republication of the novel points to its potential to prompt readers to think in new ways about memory and, as I see it, to conceptualize unsettling nostalgia as a response to the Pinochet aftermath. I agree with Jameson who recognizes the value of nostalgia in his essay “Walter Benjamin; or, Nostalgia” in Marxism and Form. “There is no reason why nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of Benjamin is there to prove it” (Jameson 1971, 82). To my mind, the same could be said of Roberto Brodsky, whose form of selfconscious “unsettling nostalgia” is compelling because it does not remain trapped in immobilizing ruminations on bygone days. Rather, it forces us to question the governmental and societal move towards reconciliation and closure to a conflict that is not “settled.” Unsettling nostalgia bears the unresolved tensions and the contradictions that are worth conserving insofar as they provoke further discussion about the questions at stake. These questions involve the dangers of both forgetting the systematic repression of the Pinochet regime as well as endorsing the current neoliberal political-economic and social model that the regime implemented and ruthlessly upheld. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2011 in Chasqui 40 no. 2, 108–24.

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2. In 2006, during the last year of his six-year term, Lagos granted monetary compensation to victims of torture under the Pinochet regime. They were identified in the 2004 Valech Report, which contained information on execution, detention, and torture during the dictatorship. These events, which followed Pinochet’s 1998 arrest, marked a turning point. Charges brought against ex-DINA agents and former soldiers significantly increased. In May 2008, one hundred former soldiers and secret police officers were arrested for human rights abuses during the dictatorship. 3. The scope of Hopenhayen’s book is wide-reaching, including all of Latin America; however, the author often refers specifically to the case of Chile. 4. I was introduced to this Benjaminian concept through Cecilia Enjuto Rangel. See the chapter “The Spanish Civil War: A Transatlantic Vision” in her book Cities in Ruins: The Politics of Modern Poetics. 5. “Es cierto que algunos son directamente homos y otras buscan un clima bi, pero la mayoría no son nada; gente que ha perdido el viaje y lleva la retirada como una injusticia marcada en las caras, un voto de contrición voluntaria que no conoce la revancha, ni la necesitan ya, porque en su sombría sabiduría reconocen que han sobrevivido a la historia así como están. Tipos que no guerrean ni vociferan más allá del perecible entusiasmo con el que aúllan en el local” (Brodsky 2001, 126). All translations of Roberto Brodsky’s work are my own. 6. “me considero un artista, le dije, alguien que interpreta para los demás, también un pedagogo. . . . la decadencia de nuestra percepción es lo que me motiva. Mi show no es más que eso: una bola de cristal vuelta hacia el pasado” (Brodsky 2001, 123). 7. “una dislocación del tiempo, su división en un antes y un después separados a completo beneficio del presente, que ahora se inclinaba sin matices bajo el signo de la conquista suprema” (Brodsky 2001, 97). 8. “Me gustó hacerlo. Levantar ese enorme edificio con las manos, día y noche en horarios de triple jornada, mientras Allende nos arengaba a no cejar en la batalla, a redoblar la vigilancia, a organizarnos y apoyar al gobierno” (Brodsky 2001, 56). 9. “Me alegro de haber participado en su construcción. . . . Ese edificio contiene toda la experiencia política de la que soy o fui capaz” (Brodsky 2001, 56-57). 10. “Ese edificio es una lección del lugar que ocupan los hombres en la historia, suelto en voz alta cuando me entusiasmo, aunque mis alumnos no lo aprovechan porque nada les interesa menos que la historia de la construcción de la UNCTAD, y de cómo pasó a llamarse Diego Portales y luego Gabriela Mistral y mañana quién sabe; quizá́ decidan dejarla en el anonimato como una síntesis de los últimos treinta años, el espejo de la patria donde yo me miro sin que se note lo que miro” (Brodsky 2001, 57). 11. “ningún fruto solitario redimiría esa tierra de callampas crecidas, y por eso en Lo Hermida no tenían otra salida que organizarse y tomar la pobreza entre sus propias manos, y éste era el principio de la lucha entre las clases” (Brodsky 2001, 102). 12. “la pobreza era una maldición, un estigma que no salía ni se lavaba con buenas intenciones sino frotándola contra sí misma” (Brodsky 2001, 101–2). 13. “mi preparación revolucionaria era escasa. Me costaba retener las siglas y saber a qué correspondían las Jap, el Cup, la Jota y el Fer—que eran los más revolucionarios, y donde militaban todos los del grupo de Toñ a, levantando el puño al grito de ‘estudiar, luchar y vencer’” (Brodsky 2001, 55). Note the following: JAP: Junta de Abastecimiento y Precios; CUP: Comité s de Unidad Popular; La Jota: Chile’s Communist Party Youth Organization; FER: Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarios; CUT: Central Ú nica de Trabajadores; MAPU: Movimiento de Acció n Popular Unitaria; MIR: Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. 14. “Tuve entonces una sensación inmovilizante, de espejo roto que ha perdurado hasta hoy, como si la pantalla del televisor volviera a trizarse en medio de un capítulo de Combate y las esquirlas salpicaran la sala entre el ahogo y la confusión” (Brodsky 2001, 87). 15. In a 2001 interview, Brodsky stated, “La dictadura ya se zampó mi juventud con un largo toque de queda (y) el Estado me castigó todo lo que pudo” (Angélica Rivera 16 May 2001). Brodsky, who was approximately fifteen years of age at the time of the coup, later lived in exile in Venezuela, Argentina, and Spain. During the UP government, he was a young

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militant in the FER. After his return to Chile in the early 1980s he worked as a journalist and became involved in clandestine oppositional press networks. 16. Allende “se transformaba en un ideal, es decir en algo eterno que exigía ser considerado sin ambigüedad” (Brodsky 2001, 91). 17. “me entregué al gracioso juego de inventarme a mí mismo” (“I became committed to the entertaining game of inventing myself”; Brodsky 2001, 109). 18. “Hasta me puse un sobrenombre para mi papel revolucionario, Palo Blanca, el intelectual del grupo, y era tal el entusiasmo de mi lengua que en ocasiones mis oyentes se agitaban entre proclamas y promesa de alistarse para librar un pedazo del territorio, mientras las voces se alzaban con ecos de la batalla de Chacabuco y terminábamos todos subidos arriba de las mesas y cantando a coro: hermano chileno/ no bajes la bandera/ que aquí́ estamos dispuestos a cruzar la cordillera, eufóricos y enamorados ante la impasibilidad de los mozos que nos perdonaban la embriaguez” (Brodsky 2001, 111). 19. “Paseaba mi argumento de confitería en confitería, y muy pronto la ciudad se transformó en mi madriguera o, mejor dicho, en mi locutorio; conocí cada uno de sus rincones como si de una amante se tratara, amaneciendo en las plazoletas y en los parques con un pucho negro en la boca, develado por los detalles y combinando sus posibilidades, narrando sucesos y agregando datos que mis ocasionales oyentes escuchaban con el oído atento, influidos por las noticias de los diarios que volvían mi relato más imprescindible y necesario a medida que la tiniebla ensombrecía las informaciones que llegaban” (Brodsky 2001, 113). 20. “Sin duda amanece un día en que . . . emerge el pasado en un momento de incertidumbre para exorcizar el tiempo maligno y sórdido y volver a traer la serenidad, ridiculizando y desbaratando la frágil y estéril, quimérica e insatisfecha condición de un presente torturado y andarín, eternamente absorto en el vuelo de una mosca en torno a una tulipa verde” (Benet cited in Brodsky 2001, 9). 21. “recorrer los pueblos y ciudades de la memoria . . . para representar mi verdad en la historia” (Brodsky 2001, 118). 22. See Michael Löwy, 2005, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's “On the Concept of History”. New York: Verso, 25. 23. “Regresar a Santiago era exponerse a una recaída, y era evidente que lo lamentaba . . . a pesar de los veintitantos años transcurridos desde que los Costa se marcharan todavía Cacho no se resolvía a clausurar la puerta que batía a sus espaldas” (Brodsky 2001, 132). 24. “Esa sería también mi prueba o mi pago, aunque en ese momento me parecía imposible otra noche más de despedida” (Brodsky 2001, 147).

Chapter Two

Memories of Motherhood and Militancy in Chile Gender and Nostalgia in Calle Santa Fe by Carmen Castillo

Unlike the visible mechanisms of gender hierarchies and militarized masculinity that characterized the Pinochet’s regime’s right-wing ideology (1973–1990), the features of gender politics on the left in Chile have been arguably more complex and diverse. During the Allende period (1970–1973) leftist women mobilized in large numbers to demand economic justice and to champion the struggles of disenfranchised groups, including women, workers, and cultural minorities. 1 After the military coup, many of these women protested against state-sponsored human rights violations sanctioned by the regime, and some even participated in clandestine operations to overthrow the dictatorship. Active engagement in leftist resistance movements such as the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) or the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR) seemed to open a window for Chilean women to enter into spaces that had been entirely male-dominated and to participate in what they saw as pivotal historical change. As we know, however, heterosexual white men have controlled most leftist organizations and political parties in Chile, and they have had an uneven record on women’s rights (Friedman 2010, 285). As Gina Herrmann illustrates in “Voices of the Vanquished: Leftist Women and the Spanish Civil War,” that was also the case in Spain: “the social conservatism of the left circumscribed, to varying degrees, the potential for female political agency (2003, 15). In the abstract, leftist militant groups in both Spain and Chile upheld a far-reaching revolutionary platform encompassing the emancipation 77

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of women, but insofar as they considered the struggle for gender equality as subordinate to the class struggle, their ideologies remained fundamentally patriarchal. In practice, this meant that organizations like the MIR in Chile ended up maintaining, albeit inadvertently, conventional gender norms and, by extension, hindering a more comprehensive move towards female empowerment. Juan Duchesne Winter highlights this incongruity in his recent study of Latin American revolutionary culture La guerrilla narrada (2010), indicating that women rarely held high-ranking positions within militant movements, and those that did often faced entrenched paternalistic attitudes and behaviors (Duchesne Winter 2010, 213). 2 Consequently, women involved in the anti-Pinochet resistance arguably contended with a dual challenge: to fight against the misogynist violence of the right-wing military junta, and additionally to deal with the paradoxes concerning gender among the parties of the left. In the wake of dictatorial violence in Chile, and Latin America more broadly, the artistic and academic grounds on which the questions of political legacies have been debated are wide-ranging. But, to various degrees, there has been little place for the topic of women, motherhood, and militancy. That is to say, writers and filmmakers have represented a variety of topoi common to post-dictatorial culture, but the perspective of female militants has largely remained on the margins of discourse. As journalist Cherie Zalaquett argues in her book, Chilenas en armas (2009), women’s participation in revolutionary politics has been rendered invisible in the majority of historical, cultural and sociological studies. Perhaps the most iconic feminine image in the context of Latin American dictatorships is of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who, despite their brave campaign to end human rights abuses in Argentina and to demand accountability, have often been cast as the victims of human rights violations rather than historical agents. How, then, can we account for the multiple experiences of women in the landscape of Latin American politics? What might we gain from an attentive reflection on the intersections of subject formations and social relationships and the affective complexities and contradictions that arise from them? In the Southern Cone, a modest number of historians, social scientists, journalists, and survivors have recently sought to answer these questions, producing a pioneering corpus of socio-historical examinations of women’s political participation (Zalaquett, Jelin, Franco, Bunster-Burotto, Baldéz, Franceschet, Mooney, Richard, Shayne, Friedman, Llanos, Segato) and testimonies that give voice to the personal experiences of women in militant movements (Diana, Castillo). While this collection of studies offers valuable insight into women’s political involvement, the complexity of the gendered politics of social revolution and resistance calls for new areas of research and debates addressing not only the achievements and limitations of reach of leftist women, but also how they remember and represent their own struggles

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in the post-dictatorship. By paying attention to the gendered dimensions of political resistance in cultural production such as film, literature, and testimony produced by women and about women, we might complicate appeals to a univocal masculinist and heteronormative narrative of the anti-Pinochet resistance. Such investigation, by extension, contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogue among the humanities and social sciences on the meanings and memories of revolution and dictatorship in contemporary Latin America and Spain. The primary goal of this chapter is to address the complexities and heterogeneities of representations of memories of militant women who played a role in political struggles during and after the Allende years. I will deal specifically with the autobiographical film Calle Santa Fe (2008) by Carmen Castillo (b. 1945) and ask how Castillo (director and protagonist) depicts the lingering recollections of her participation in Chile’s effort to implement democratic-socialist change, as well as the traumatic memories of political persecution. To my mind, the film constitutes a striking example of an unsettling nostalgic reflection on the period that raises new questions about the multiple meanings of the dictatorial past and how the intersections of gender and revolution have shaped such meanings. My reading of the film thus pushes the conversation beyond the notion of an unproductive nostalgia for a singular distant past to a conception of generative nostalgia that contributes to a creative understanding of the ties joining past and present. This framework opens up a dialogue not only about the extent to which organizations like the MIR struggled to move past the gendered structures of a patriarchal society but also the clash between the temporalities and affective structures of militancy and post-dictatorial memory. Whereas Castillo-the-militant prioritized political convictions over maternity, the memorialist-director questions these priorities in the present, thus ostensibly re-asserting the gendered role of motherhood that militancy seemed to challenge. In my estimation, however, this temporal disjuncture does not signal a mere retreat to the patriarchal model, but rather an attempt to engender a political genealogy that might at once contribute to the process of mourning and animate history for future collective goals. Castillo-thememorialist grapples with the emotional reaction to unmourned loss and disenchantment, both individual and collective, through a search for meaningful intergenerational bonds and life storytelling practices performed through what Sidonie Smith calls the memorial relationality of parent-child relationships (Smith 2011b, 8). The film thus gives us insight into recent historical processes in Chile marked by the intersections of gender and politics, and additionally demonstrates that the narration of life stories through a critical nostalgic lens in the aftermath of dictatorial violence has the potential to provide what Smith calls an occasion for “assembling and claiming identities” and “negotiating affective attachments” (Smith 2011a, 565).

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AN ALTERNATIVE APPROACH TO NOSTALGIA AND POSTDICTATORIAL DOCUMENTARY FILM Calle Santa Fe is a first-person autobiographical film directed by and featuring a former revolutionary militant who was forced into political exile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship. More specifically, the documentary probes Castillo’s involvement in the MIR and her truncated relationship with the movement’s leader, Miguel Enríquez. Some viewers will recall that the group emerged from student organizations in 1965 and gained support among shantytowns and trade unions in Santiago. While the MIR largely supported the Popular Unity government, the group advocated a far more radical model of revolution to end labor exploitation, class hierarchies, and neoliberal imperialist policies. Although the film features the testimonies of both men and women, this essay focuses on women’s voices and particularly the stories of Margarita Marchi (MIR militant, detained and tortured in 1975, exiled in 1976, returned clandestinely to Chile in 1980), Macarena Aguiló (daughter of Margarita Marchi and filmmaker) and Carmen Castillo (MIR militant, exiled in 1976). 3 As the film recalls through archival footage, after the 1973 coup, the military insurrectionists systematically dismantled the democratic state, implemented a far-reaching neoliberal economic agenda, and brutally repressed all leftwing opposition. Militants from every leftist party were persecuted, but the regime’s first priority was the MIR, which had sworn to resist military rule at all costs. Between the years 1973 and 1977, eight hundred MIR militants were disappeared or killed. Enríquez and Castillo were forced into hiding, as they became primary targets for the regime. On October 5, 1974, special agents located them in a safe house and engaged them in a two-hour gun battle. Meanwhile, a neighbor contacted an ambulance, which arrived shortly after the special operatives had pulled the unconscious and pregnant Castillo out of the house and into the street. Enríquez died at the scene, but Castillo survived. Their two young daughters, Javiera and Camila, were safe in the Italian Embassy on the day of the attack. After recovering in a local hospital, Castillo went into political exile in Paris where she still lives today. The film follows her on her emotional return to the house on Santa Fe Street where she interviews witnesses, former revolutionaries, family members, and the neighbor that saved her life. Instead of reading this documentary for its objective “truths,” I approach it similarly to the way that I would approach a memoir—as a subjective account created through the selection and arrangement of memories into a narrative form that manifests the fluctuating ideological and emotional positions of the author. In Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson emphasize “the intersubjective exchange between narrator and reader aimed at producing a shared under-

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standing of the meaning of a life” (Smith and Watson 2001, 13). Their point is that autobiography constructs and bestows meaning on memories. This concept of life narrative additionally allows for an emphasis on the shifting politics of memory and the ways in which the construction of memory is rooted in larger processes of cultural negotiation. As sociologist Elizabeth Jelin suggests, memories are not simply stored away intact in a memory depository, but rather part of subjective processes embedded in networks of institutions, groups, and cultures in the present (Jelin 2003, 10). Calle Santa Fe cinematographically stages this understanding of memory by performing the filmmaker’s state of mind, which lingers between nostalgic memories of resistance and ambivalent views concerning women’s political protagonism, motherhood, and return. Castillo deals with such contentious issues by exploring, rather than obscuring, the emotional charge of one’s personal experience. As I explained in the introduction to this book, nostalgic longing can take many forms. Castillo’s film renders visible an unsettling nostalgia. It combines what Boym calls “restorative nostalgia”, or an idealizing discourse that seeks to mend the incongruities of memory with a “reflective nostalgia”, one that displays the silences and complexities of memories and their difficult narration in the present (2001, xviii). The film begins with an overtly idealized picture of the resistance that soon becomes more complicated as Castillo delves further into the uncomfortable zones of memory. Through dialogues and voiceovers, Castillo cross-examines her own assumptions, and in doing so, transforms simple nostalgic recollections into a thought-provoking portrayal. In what follows, I will focus on how strategies, such as dialogue, montage, and framing highlight these different nostalgic modes and make the documentary form a compelling medium for understanding the critical and gendered dimensions of nostalgic longing as well as the relationship between the emotional, the historical, the political, and the cultural, and how these interpellate the present. LONGING FOR RESISTANCE IN CALLE SANTA FE Calle Santa Fe is both an elaboration and reevaluation of the testimonial texts and films that Castillo produced while in exile, namely Un día de octubre en Santiago (1980) La Flaca Alejandra (1993), and Santiago-París: El vuelo de la memoria (2002). What distinguishes Calle Santa Fe from these previous works is its focus on Castillo’s return home and her nostalgic longing to salvage remnants from the past. With its self-conscious style, I characterize the film as a hybrid documentary form, combining elements of the essay-film, the historical documentary, and the autobiographical film. It

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is constructed from interviews, a poetic narrative, creative reenactments, and archival footage. These strategies allow Castillo to highlight the contradictions and limitations of memory, and by extension, to raise important issues about the relationship between memory, history, and representation. Equally important is the way in which Castillo draws from the essay-film genre to the extent that the voiceover and framing contain a political-essayistic discourse about the violence of the regime and its legacy. For Phillip Lopate an essay film “tracks a person’s thoughts as he or she tries to work out some mental knot, however various its strands” (Lopate 1996, 246). Hybridity, thus, characterizes Castillo's documentary form and the type of nostalgia conveyed in the film. As noted, the film begins with a restorative nostalgic rendering of 1974 insofar as it recasts the past in an overtly idealized form in contrast with the dystopian present. Castillo’s wistful memories of an exciting, revolutionary period seem to block out or ignore the complexities of her gendered experience that she later poignantly underscores. A description of the opening three-minute segment will illustrate my point. A brief synopsis of the events of 1973 is followed by black and white newsreel footage that spotlights a suited journalist announcing breaking news—the detection and murder of Miguel Enríquez and the capture of Carmen Castillo. The safe house, where the crime took place, crackles onto the screen. La Calle Santa Fe, which significantly means Holy Faith Street, becomes a mythical space in the public sphere. For the regime’s champions, it was a site of victory over communist terrorists; however, for the regime’s opponents, it was a brutal site of conquest. The melancholic tone of the violin and flute resonates while the archival footage cuts to an image in the present. A highangle shot captures from above an image of Castillo sifting through old photos, political pamphlets, and letters. This frame foreshadows her ensuing re-examination of the past and her chafed memories of resistance and defeat. Following this high-angle shot, a fluid, contemplative camera glides across a wooden floor, which has several symbolic objects strewn over it, including a child’s stuffed animal and several books by José Martí and other intellectuals and revolutionaries. These emblems of lost innocence and idealism are set in a room with an open window through which light and breeze gently enter through a white curtain. In a voiceover, we hear the coarse, yet tender sound of Castillo’s voice. I don’t have to try to remember the beauty of his face on the day of his death. It is not Miguel who has left. It is I who has become a stranger in this story. I spent only ten months in that house on Santa Fe Street; and yet all that I could hope for in a lifetime, I lived there. Perhaps that is happiness. Living every minute as if it were the last. Threats and fear stayed outside. After passing through the door, we regained life. The space of the house is filled with music, tangos, Beethoven, aromas from the kitchen and children’s games. Miguel

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Figure 2.1. Castillo over an archive of photos and documents. Screenshot taken from Calle Santa Fe.

works, writes by hand, and I type. He whirls around, speaking at full speed. Night falls, he reads stories to our girls, laughter, and dancing. The time is there. It does not proceed. I just had to get used to the absence, the emptiness to one day dare to approach the house, which has been embedded in me since that Saturday, October 5, 1974. Yes, it all started in that house—the break with my country and the heartbreaking uprooting of an adventurous family. (All translations are my own) 4

This film sequence, with its poetic arrangement of images, music, and prose, effectively aestheticizes restorative nostalgia. According to Boym restorative nostalgia attempts to recover the past intact, to “rebuild the mythical place called home” (Boym 2001, 50). As if to return to that time, Castillo shifts her verb tense from the preterit to the present mid-way through when she says, “After passing through the door, we regained life. The space of the house is filled with music.” The narrative follows her in her mind as she attempts to travel back in time. We should recall that the word nostalgia combines the Greek “nostos,” meaning homecoming, with algos, meaning pain or longing. Through idealized allusions to kitchen aromas and children’s games, Castillo bespeaks her longing to return home, to a glorified domestic space. However, her emphasis on mutual exchange of ideas and intellectual activity suggests that for Castillo this idyllic space was not a separate sphere for women, but rather a utopian site where both parents were able to fulfill nurturing roles while simultaneously engaging in political activism. Her fixation on the res-

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toration of the home can, therefore, be read as a manifestation of her longing to mend the painful ruptures that halted the full realization of that utopian dream. Furthermore, this scene suggests that for the survivors, feelings of loss and regret accumulate over the years and generate (or are generated by) both a sense of disillusionment with the present and a longing to preserve the memories of social activism and community that appear to be lacking in the twenty-first century. Remembering Miguel thus serves as an antidote to a sense of disenchantment in Castillo’s present. Significantly, the backdrop of the film soon becomes the city of Santiago in the post-dictatorial present. The rage against the economic and social inequalities that fueled mass political participation in the 1960s and 1970s appears to be absent in present-day Santiago. In the background, we catch a glimpse of a McDonald’s restaurant (maximum symbol of globalization and neoliberalism) and a large political campaign advertisement for the right-wing politician and business tycoon Sebastián Piñera. Some viewers will recall that over the 1990s Piñera owned Chilevisión (a major media outlet) and publicly supported former officials of the Pinochet regime for office. Of course, he strongly opposed Pinochet’s arrest and detention in 1998. Fast forward to 2008, when Calle Santa Fe was first released, and Piñera was a major political candidate despite widespread public knowledge of numerous scandals including dirty business dealings and political corruption. Two years later, after Michele Bachelet’s first term in office, Piñera would win the presidential election with the Renovación Nacional, thus ensuring the continuation of the neoliberal political-economic model that the Pinochet regime implemented and ruthlessly upheld (2010–2014). He would later win a second presidential election in 2018. In a voiceover accompanying this image of present-day Santiago, Castillo explains that instead of encountering “home,” she encounters the arrogance of the victors, the impunity of the criminals and general amnesia. Through a montage of archival footage, Castillo soon juxtaposes a current period of apathy, individualism, and consumerism with a bygone period of utopian desires. Castillo’s mournful lament for the fallen militants of the MIR combines with an appeal to the recovery of their memory in the present. She insists, “It cannot be true that we are once again in Santiago, as if all that we went through never happened, as if our dead never existed.” 5 The soundtrack then cuts to the vibrant strumming of an acoustic guitar, which blends seamlessly with an archival clip that spotlights MIR militants marching in the streets during the Allende period. As a response to what she views as widespread historical amnesia, Castillo considers the prospect of buying back the safe house to transform it into a museum—one that would restore the memory of Miguel and honor the suffering of the MIR. In a poignant close-up, the film captures Castillo’s grand-

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daughter outside of the home chipping away the paint from the exterior wall as if searching for something underneath. This scene recalls Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Salvador Allende (2004), which like Calle Santa Fe bespeaks what Idelber Avelar calls in his study of post-dictatorial fiction “an estranged, denaturalized relation” to the present, as if “trapped between the imperative of memory and the general inability to imagine an alternative future” (Avelar 1999, 10). As Michael Lazzara points out in his essay on Chilean documentary film, Guzmán zooms in on a wall from which a small bit of paint has been scratched away. “Facing this wall covered by a metaphorical layer of forgetfulness (literally, paint), Guzmán remembers that on the very same wall the Ramona Parra Brigade once painted a mural to honor Allende” (Lazzara 2012, 74). 6 The imagery of the encrusted wall can be read in both films as a site of ruins which Guzmán and Castillo long to excavate, thereby exposing and giving meaning to the Allende years in the aftermath of the dictatorship. If we conclude that Castillo mythologizes the anti-Pinochet resistance and seeks to enshrine Miguel’s memory and their revolutionary project in the house, the film manifests a textbook example of restorative nostalgia. As I already suggested, however, the film does not simply idealize the past, but instead foregrounds its unsettling complexities and the intersections of gender and politics that affect them. I agree with Nelly Richard, who contends that one of the film’s greatest achievements is how Castillo brings to the fore

Figure 2.2. Castillo’s granddaughter near the safe house on Calle Santa Fe. Screenshot taken from Calle Santa Fe.

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the oscillations amid uncomfortable “in between” zones; zones that alternate between yesterday and today in order to disturb the comfortable discourse of memory that remains focused on the linear transmission of a distant historical memory (Richard 2010, 138). Richard underscores how the film is profoundly interrogative by nature instead of prescriptive precisely because it exposes cracks that defy a unified account that relieves the pain of the divided self (Richard 2010, 158). She contends that women introduce dissonant voices of the anti-hegemonic “other” into the uniform discourse of the maledominated radical left. This is also an argument that Bernardita Llanos makes in her article “Subjetividad y memoria en Calle Santa Fe de Carmen Castillo” (2013). For Richard, Castillo’s inclusion of uncomfortable memories linked to gender is a “corrugation” that acts as an anti-dogmatic resource that cracks the mold of absolute truths of party membership (Richard 2010, 160–61). In the pages that follow, I expand on these interpretations by offering a close analysis of the film’s aesthetic framing of the uneasy and gendered questions that “trouble myths of legacy, confound self-understandings, and reroute personal narratives” (Smith 2011a, 566). I trace the critical dimensions of nostalgia through an analysis of how the film frames the intersections of politics and gender. MOTHERHOOD AND MILITANCY: UNSETTLING NOSTALGIA IN CALLE SANTA FE Although Castillo does not explicitly engage the debates over women’s rights in Chile or women’s roles within a male-dominated political movement, she includes important moments of self-reflection that shed light on how gender and politics interact. In my estimation, the most interesting element that adds a reflective dimension to the film is Castillo’s exploration of the politics of motherhood. In The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women’s Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile, Pieper Mooney suggests that “the social construction of women’s roles, as mothers and individuals, lies at the heart of gender systems” and therefore “the lens of motherhood offers revealing new insights into specific histories of women’s rights” (Mooney 2009, 3). Castillo’s testimony along with the numerous interviews with politically engaged women who had children either before or during the dictatorship offer an important window to read through the construction of female subjectivity in a period of political activism, exile and clandestine activity. Here, I would like to draw on Gina Herrmann’s insightful oral history project about women participants in the anti-Franco resistance in Spain. According to Herrmann, it is the intersection of politics and maternity that complicates the life narratives of politically active women. Herrmann’s oral history project on antifascist movements in the Spanish Civil War has been extremely helpful in

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my analysis, a fact that reiterates the potential of a transatlantic feminist approach to doing post-dictatorial memory studies. In Herrmann’s oral history project, she encounters two patterns similar to what we find in the case of Chile: The first tended to reveal a structure that borrows from storytelling templates informed specifically by the oral culture of popular songs and poems that heroicize the revolutionary proletariat fighter model which operates as an internalized plot. . . . The second, more fragmented story appears to be the result of an antagonistic relationship between politics and domesticity, and between militarism and motherhood. . . . It follows then, that the confusion, disjuncture, pain, and eventual absence of agency that these women experienced in the postwar would play out in oral narratives often characterized by fragmentation, circularity, or the loss of linear plotting. (Herrmann 2003, 19)

Expanding on Herrmann’s insights, I suggest that the interviews that foreground the relationship between motherhood and political activism in Calle Santa Fe complicate what might otherwise be considered an uncritical nostalgic homage to the resistance fighters of the MIR. To demonstrate this point, I would like to turn to the interview with Margarita Marchi, a former MIR member who was detained in 1975, tortured and forced into political exile in 1976 then returned clandestinely to Chile in 1978. The narrative form of the first segment of the interview can be characterized as a coherent, linear reconstruction, even when she is asked about her detention and torture in 1975. Although Marchi does not say so directly, we know that within the context of political persecution, women’s bodies became sites for male dominance and violence. In her provocative testimony El infierno (1993), Luz Arce describes in excruciating detail the dehumanizing sexual abuse that she experienced at the hands of the hypermasculine secret police, which ultimately led her to a life of betrayal. Similar to Gladys Díaz (MIR leader, detained and tortured in 1975 and exiled in 1977), Marchi refused to collaborate under torture; however, on-screen she avoids such dark memories and instead nostalgically recalls her equal standing with men in the underground resistance that began operations in Chile in 1978. The plan was called “Operación Retorno,” and it involved clandestine re-entry in Pinochet’s Chile to overthrow the regime. Participants were required to temporarily leave their children with families abroad, namely in Cuba. What is most striking about Marchi’s narrative is the way that it falls apart precisely when Castillo asks her about her role as a militant and mother. Margarita Marchi: The idea was to recover, and in that recovery, the call was for all who wanted to be a part of it. That did not only involve men, but also women. Castillo: But how is it possible that we had children? You had to leave Maca . . .

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Chapter 2 Marchi: (Long pause) . . . Well, what do you mean? We had children . . . I think that . . . ultimately, we chose life and having children is that, right? It is to live, to project oneself, to give meaning to life. And . . . I don’t know. . . . my experience in that . . . In the case of Macarena, it is super painful . . . It has been very hard for me . . . very hard . . . to accept it even today. It is something that is not . . . it was not an act, um . . . that is to say, um . . . how could I explain this to you . . . we were simply facing the moment and justifying it at that time, but it was a decision that has always had its price. Castillo: What? What decision? Marchi: Leaving . . . um, um . . . not being with Macarena. 7

Visibly staggered by Castillo’s emphasis on the gendered nature of their experience as mothers and militants, Marchi struggles to articulate her decisions and their lasting consequences. This derailment exposes deeper anxieties rooted not only in the Chilean context but in a broader global political arena, over a woman’s role in masculinized leftist movements. Although Marchi appears to have attained a sense of peace from the intergenerational bonds that she ultimately established with her children (as we later see in the film), the anxiety that previously colored her understanding of a mother’s role in a militant movement is reenacted in her testimony. It is de-centered and marked by the erosion of coherence. The lucid temporal sequencing and enthusiastic—uncritical—nostalgia that characterizes the first part of her narrative suddenly abrades once she is asked to address her role as both a militant and mother. It is also important to note that this scene frames Marchi with a mirror in the background reflecting Castillo’s image as if she were questioning herself. It is my sense that Castillo’s probing questions bespeak her own desire to come to terms with a past fraught with uncertainty and guilt. Throughout the film, she mines personal memories of motherhood and militancy in emotional sketches and vignettes. Perhaps the most harrowing memory involves Castillo’s hospitalization after the ambush, which she visually animates through a creative reenactment that differs from the film’s primary use of archival film material and contemporary interviews. In this intimate evocation, Castillo blurs images from an emergency room to stage the afterlife of traumatic moments caused by the secret police that ultimately led to the loss of her pregnancy. She uses a hand-held camera, changes in camera level, lighting effects, and color enhancement to reconstruct the episode—so jarring that it requires alternative forms of representation. As opposed to the compulsive reenactment that Dominic LaCapra has theorized as “acting out” (LaCapra 2001, 143–44), I read this audiovisual presentation as a conscious attempt to “work through” this particularly painful and gendered recollection. Archival clips then take us back to Castillo’s years in exile when she grappled not only with the physical and psychological trauma of having lost her partner and pregnancy, but also with the rela-

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Figure 2.3. Margarita Marchi and Carmen Castillo. Screenshot taken from Calle Santa Fe.

tionship between political struggle and traditional gender roles. In what seems to be a confession, Castillo recalls her inability to manage her involvement in resistance networks and motherhood in tandem. The film then shifts to the present. As the camera frames her looking at children’s paintings and black and white photographs, she ruminates on her decision to send her sixyear-old daughter to Havana, Cuba, for what would become a decade-long separation. The soundtrack that accompanies the scene is a Cuban son that grows faint as the camera zooms in on the old letters. The music fades to silence, and the voiceover becomes a channel through which Castillo communicates her sorrow and regret to her daughter. Since my life was no longer at risk, I could dedicate it to activist work. Testifying to the violence consumed me, I was no longer able to be a mother. In 1977, I let Camilla leave for Havana. She was six years old and embraced an old rag doll. You did not return to my side, Camilla, until the day of your seventeenth birthday. You grew up writing me letters every night to ward off the distance. I responded by evading you, feeling compelled to avoid my obligations in order to find again, if only for a moment, the dream of my life as a woman and militant. 8

In Castillo’s attempt to represent the emotional torment of political persecution and resistance, she necessarily represents the complexities of female subjectivity. From my point of view, the film does not seek to rectify the past

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through definitive justifications, nor conversely offer an apology. Instead, it stimulates a broad reflection on the difficult negotiations that women have made between motherhood and political commitments in times of dictatorship and how these negotiations remain unresolved today. These scarcely discussed experiences attest to the pervasiveness, even among progressive groups, of ingrained beliefs about ideal womanhood as essentially self- sacrificing and suited more for the private than public sphere. Significantly, questions concerning the difficult task of balancing politics and parenthood are not asked of the male interviewees in the film, which signals internalized views about care work and women’s roles. While Castillo fails to confront this gender imbalance among a radical leftist group directly, the film’s inclusion of uncomfortable questions unmasks the multiple challenges that Chilean women have faced as political actors and mothers compared to their male counterparts. By drawing attention to the theme of motherhood, the film at once encourages a reflection on the shortcomings of radical leftist movements and beckons us to search for what Tamara Spira calls “a foothold from which we might imagine deeper forms of radical justice” (Spira 2011, 173). To this point, I have argued that the unresolved tension between politics and motherhood reveals Calle Santa Fe’s unsettling nostalgic character. The film begins with a remarkably restorative nostalgic scene then effectively problematizes this type of nostalgia by calling attention to the charged silences related to memories of maternity and resistance. Through the presentation of these memories, the film does not merely idealize the past, but rather engages what Jelin calls the arduous labors of memory (Jelin 2003, 5). The film further implores us to consider memories of motherhood and militancy by featuring interviews with the daughters of militant mothers. In one revealing scene, Castillo sits on a park bench with an unnamed woman who as a child was sent to live in a commune called “Proyecto Hogares” in Cuba with sixty other children when her parents participated in “Operación Retorno.” The scene opens with the sound of a carnival and an image of a street vendor with children’s toys—an appropriate introduction to the ensuing dialogue that foregrounds the child’s perspective. As the carnival music fades into a soft accompaniment, the film faces head-on the problems with which the daughters of militant mothers have grappled: MIR daughter: I suffered so much . . . for many years. So very, very much. I had a lot of hatred towards my mother and father. I could not understand . . . and in a very particular way I could never understand why my mother left us. I could never forgive her for it. Castillo: What did you understand about your mother? And about us? Because my case is the same. It is the same case of many militant mothers. MIR daughter: Yes... well, I still I cannot . . . I mean, it’s . . . phew . . . now I understand now . . . now . . . now . . . now . . . that is, now I understand and I

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understand her position and what she wanted to do, but unconsciously I cannot overcome it. I cannot overcome it . . . that is, it is something that still makes me cry . . . it is still the first punch that I throw at her when we argue, the first point that I bring out against her. For a long time I thought that was the biggest mistake of the MIR, but it’s complicated because I have very mixed memories . . . Project Homes was a project . . . it was a very beautiful project because we were all children together and there was a very special feeling that we shared . . . but, at the same time, there was a great sorrow that we felt for being abandoned and for always feeling . . . always being considered second. 9

Here, the daughter’s attempt to see the mother-daughter relationship within the broader context of the Latin American political struggle is evident, but judgment rooted in gender prevails. It hinders what could otherwise be an empathetic bond between mother and daughter through loss and survival. This illustration has important consequences for the larger debate about revolutionary culture in Latin America and Spain, suggesting that militant mothers, in contrast with fathers, have been judged and judge themselves in terms of their ability to care for the family. Such narratives bring nuance to Castillo’s initial nostalgic ruminations on the MIR’s efforts to create a utopian future. They move beyond simplistic categories that reduce women to heroines or victims. Following this scene Castillo returns to her own family’s story, explaining that her daughters remain silent: “They are silent, and I accept that silence. We never could have imagined that we did so much harm.” 10 On one hand, the pangs of remorse that fuel Castillo’s confession can be read as a reassertion of the “essential” gender role that militancy sought to undermine. On the other, the types of questions that she asks herself can be understood as a productive challenge that forces us to think about how militant women struggle to make sense of their sacrifices within the patriarchal structures of the present wherein political engagement and its demands continue to be deeply gendered. The perspective of the filmmaker thus becomes what Sidonie Smith calls “a nodal point of a collective consciousness” that goes beyond the kinds of stories typically mobilized, and by extension requires a new “ethics of receiving and reading” (Smith 2011b, 7–9). This type of ethics is elegantly modeled within the film through an interview with Macarena Aguiló (Margarita Marchi’s daughter). She leaves behind blame and accusation, revealing an empathetic response to memories of a dislocated past. The difference between the two daughters’ narratives calls for a consideration of possible reasons. Both daughters form part of the same generation of children of militants that experienced the effects of the dictatorship in their youth. Now, as adults, they must piece together the story by listening to their parents’ accounts and blending them with their own. While the former daughter seems to have deep-seated misgivings about remembering, Aguiló shows a commitment to memory by participating in com-

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memorative events and producing films that elaborate and disseminate new narratives. First, she appears filming a memorial event for the MIR and later editing film footage and discussing her own documentary El edificio de los Chilenos (2010), which chronicles the challenges that she faced over a fouryear period in the commune “Proyecto Hogares.” 11 For me, these scenes illustrate an intimate relationship between empathy and reflective engagement with memory. Similar to her mother’s testimony, Aguiló’s narrative becomes disjointed and inarticulate once she discusses familial relationships, displaying for viewers lingering emotional fractures. At the same time, the interview demonstrates that the mother-daughter relationship, based on empathy and a shared commitment to understanding the past, might contribute to a sense of identity as well as a capacity for caring attachment to communities. Aguiló attests to the value of storytelling and storylistening to the extent that her life has been enriched through the incorporation of the legacies of other people’s lives into her own (Smith 2011a, 566). Significantly, the next scene features Aguiló engaged in a dialogue with mothers and daughters attempting to articulate the love and loss that characterize the relationships between women and political causes in Chile. One MIR militant involved in “Operación Retorno” breaks into tears as she recalls her own daughter’s continued resentment towards her for having returned to Chile clandestinely. Her broken narrative also communicates an eye-opening account of the gendered structures of the MIR, which limited women’s power in the decision-making process and discouraged the discussion of private matters in the public sphere. Militant mothers, she protests, were denied a space to collectively weigh their options and converse about their sorrow and common concerns about their roles as political agents and mothers. By calling attention to the ethical dilemma that militant women faced involving impossible choices between moral imperatives, the film renders visible the ways in which leftwing militancies reproduced the inequalities of the broader masculinized culture. Gender is thus located at the heart of both remembrance and dissidence. Mothers become the narrators of resistance stories of which their daughters become bearers; however, these resistance stories do not merely glorify a heroic past, but rather point to the difficult gendered negotiations between politics and parenting with which militant women have grappled. These segments shed new light on the broader domain of post-dictatorial memory in Latin America and offer viewers a productive framework to think about the past. By spotlighting the exchange between mothers and daughters, the film suggests that transgenerational communication of memory contributes to both the healing process and the creation of solidarity in the present. Both Castillo and Aguiló insert themselves into a larger “culture of memory” which, as Jelin points out, is “in part a response or reaction to rapid change

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and to a life without anchors or roots” (Jelin, 2003, 1). In such a cultural climate, Jelin contends, “memory has a highly significant role as a symbolic mechanism that helps strengthen the sense of belonging to groups or communities.” (Jelin 2003, 1–2). At the same time, the film suggests that transgenerational communication of memory must involve reciprocity, or a mutually beneficial exchange between generations based on a dialogue about the meaning and uses of memories in the present. This point is exemplified in a scene towards the end that frames Castillo listening to a young man who insists that memories of resistance must be meaningful today. 12 Significantly, the film’s final scenes spotlight Castillo inquiring about grassroots movements and observing a hip-hop group conveying a rallying call for social activism. The band’s last words “Lucha, vamos” (“Fight, let’s go”) are followed by a long shot of Castillo and Aguiló facing the safe house with their backs against the same wall from which Castillo’s granddaughter had scraped off a layer of paint. This shot conveys a powerful metaphor— Castillo’s longing to restore the home intact is behind her and ahead lies the aspiration to combine memories of the MIR with a commitment to the present. She resolves to have several plaques cemented into the sidewalk outside the safe house that at once mourn the death of Miguel and vindicate his memory for the future: “Live Miguel and die, grow as a red shadow, as a free-floating messenger.” 13 The memorial speech given at the site by the MIR militant Renard Betancourt blends with Castillo’s elegy: “Every defeat

Figure 2.4. Carmen Castillo and Macarena Aguiló facing the safe house. Screenshot taken from Calle Santa Fe.

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holds within it a heaven to be gained. The ghostly hour has arrived, unexpectedly and suddenly, in which we will take back the streets and carry forth a new and old dream, reinventing our spirit and our smile.” 14 These scenes resist what James E. Young considers the limitations of monumentalization characterized by an inclination to keep the past at a distance. In his study of Holocaust memorials, Young fears that “instead of searing memory and arousing public consciousness, conventional memorials seal memory off from awareness altogether” (Young 2004, 278). Calle Santa Fe shows opposition to this trend by provoking an important consideration of the unresolved conflicts that politically active women in Chile have faced and how the remembrance and communication of such disputes can be useful in the present. Castillo creates a space for the contemplation of family trauma, and in doing so, her film becomes not only a compelling essayistic historical re-examination of the past, but more broadly a film about critically engaging memory in the present. The film finds its strength not through twodimensional idealizations of resistance fighters, but rather through a nuanced rendering of the emotional landscapes of mothers and daughters whose stories bring out the complexities of historical processes while calling into question the gendered assumptions that shape them. This documentary thus plays a small but significant role in presenting alternative approaches for imagining the past in Chile that inspire new thinking and enrich historical awareness of the complex and gendered structures of post-dictatorial memories. NOTES 1. An earlier version of this chapter was published in 2012 in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 21 no. 1 (2012): 15–36. 2. Duchesne Winter’s book deals in broad terms with the narration of the Latin American guerrilla. Particularly useful for this chapter is his interview with Chique Ramírez whose memoir, titled La guerra de los 36 años: Vista con ojos de mujer de izquierda (2001), offers a critical perspective of her involvement in the guerrilla in Central America as a militant indigenous woman. In the interview, Duchesne Winter asks how women’s experiences in the guerrilla were different from men’s. Drawing from personal experience, she explains that women suffered greatly from sexism, marginalization, and objectification (213). 3. In the article, “Modes of Silence and Resistance: Chilean Documentary and Gendered Torture” (2016), I explore the nostalgic narrative of Gladys Díaz as conveyed in Calle Santa Fe. In this present chapter, I chose to center on Margarita Marchi and her daughter Macarena Aguiló because they best exemplify how the critical and gendered dimensions of nostalgia shape familial bonds. The film also features Lucía Sepúlveda (MIR leader, clandestine between 1973 and 1989), Gladys Díaz (MIR leader, detained and tortured in 1975, exiled in 1977, returned in 1990), Erica Hennings-Chanfreau (MIR militant, detained and tortured in 1974, exiled in 1976, returned in 1983), María Emilia Marchi (MIR militant, arrested and tortured in 1974, exiled in 1975, clandestine return in 1979, detained in Brazil in 1989, transferred to Chile in 1999, freed in 2000), Maria Cristina Pacheco (MIR militant, left clandestinely in 1978, returned in 1984). 4. “No me hace falta recordar la belleza de su rostro el día de su muerte. Miguel no se ha ido. Soy yo quien me he convertido en otra. Una extraña de esta historia. Y sin embargo diez meses de vida en la casa de la calle Santa Fe y todo lo que uno puede esperar a lo largo de una

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vida, allí lo viví. Quizá será eso la felicidad. Cada minuto vivido como si fuera el último. La amenaza, el miedo, se quedaban afuera. Después de atravesar la puerta recobrábamos el aliento. El espacio de la casa se llena de música, de tangos, Beethoven, Cittá Rosa. De olores de cocina y de juegos infantiles. Miguel trabaja, escribe a mano, y yo tecleo, se voltea, habla a toda velocidad. Cae la noche, les lee cuentos a nuestras niñas, risas y bailes. El tiempo está allí, no transcurre. Solo tuve que acostumbrarme a la ausencia, al vacío para osar un día acercarme a la casa. Esa casa incrustada en mí desde ese sábado cinco de octubre 1974. Sí, todo empezó en esa casa. El rompimiento con mi país, el desgarramiento de una familia a las andanzas.” 5. “No es verdad que podamos estar de nuevo en Santiago como si todo lo vivido no hubiese sucedido, como si nuestros muertos no existieran” 6. Lazzara offers a lucid comparison of Patricio Guzmán’s Salvador Allende, Carmen Castillo’s Calle Santa Fe, and Miguel Littín’s Compañero presidente. See “Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide: On Recent Chilean Documentary Films and the Writing of History” (2012). 7. Margarita Marchi: La idea era recuperar, y en esa recuperación, la convocatoria era para todos los que queríamos ser parte de eso. Y en eso de ser “parte de eso,” no solamente había hombres, sino también había mujeres. Castillo: Pero ¿cómo es posible que hayamos tenido hijos? Tú tuviste que dejar a la Maca . . . Marchi: . . . O sea, ¿cómo es posible que hayamos tenido hijos? . . . yo creo que . . . en definitiva nosotros lo que hemos hecho es optar por la vida y tener hijos es eso, ¿no? Es vivir, es proyectarse, es vivir . . . o sea es . . . tener un sentido de vida. Y . . . no sé . . . yo . . . mi experiencia en eso son . . . en el caso de Macarena es súper doloroso, eh . . . me ha costado . . . bastante asumirlo hasta el día de hoy, ya es algo que no es . . . no fue una acción . . . em . . . es decir, em . . . como podría explicarte . . . que solamente fue enfrentar un momento y justificar un momento y eso, sino que fue una decisión que ha tenido siempre costo, ¿ya? Castillo: ¿Cual? ¿Cuál decisión? Marchi: El dejar a la . . . el . . . el . . . no estar con la Macarena . . . 8. Puesto que ya no ponía en riesgo mi vida, podía dedicarla al trabajo militante. Testimoniar sin descanso, ya no conseguía ser madre. En 1977 dejé que Camila se fuera a La Habana. Tenía 6 años y abrazaba a una vieja muñeca de trapo. No regresaste a mi lado, Camila, hasta el día de tus 17 años. Creciste escribiéndome cada noche cartas para conjurar la distancia. Yo respondía esquivando, arrastrada por esa necesidad de navegar lejos de las obligaciones, para reencontrar, aunque fuera por un momento la ilusión de una vida de mujer y de militante. 9. MIR daughter: Es que yo sufrí mucho . . . durante muchos años por eso. Mucho, mucho, mucho. Tenía mucho odio por mi mamá y mi papá por eso. No podía entender . . . y de una manera muy especial nunca podía entender por qué mi mamá nos dejara. Nunca se lo podía perdonar. Castillo: ¿Qué comprendiste de tu madre? ¿De nosotras? Porque es el mismo caso mío, el mismo caso de tantas militantes. MIR daughter: Sí . . . es que todavía no puedo . . . o sea, es, ufffv . . . Ahora la entiendo, ahora, ahora, ahora, ahora, o sea, ahora la entiendo y entiendo su postura y lo que quiso hacer, pero inconscientemente en mí no lo puedo superar. No lo puedo superar . . . o sea, es algo que todavía me hace llorar . . . es algo que todavía es la primera . . . cuando discuto con ella es el primer dardo, el primer punto que yo saco contra ella es eso. Yo por mucho tiempo pensé que fue el gran error del MIR, eh, pero es complicado porque tengo recuerdos muy encontrados . . . eh.. el Proyecto Hogares era un . . . era un proyecto muy bonito porque estábamos todos los niños juntos, y había una onda muy especial de estar todos juntos y compartir todo juntos . . . pero a la vez había una pena muy grande por el abandono y siempre sentir . . . siempre ser considerados como los segundos de la historia. 10. “Ellas callan, y yo me inclino ante este silencio. Nunca hubiéramos podido imaginar que hicimos tanto mal.” 11. See the 2010 documentary film The Chilean Building by Macarena Aguiló. 12. Also see Michael Lazzara’s analysis of Calle Santa Fe in “Remembering Revolution after Ruin and Genocide” (2012) and “Guzmán’s Allende” (2009). 13. “Vivir Miguel morir, crecer como sombra roja, flotando libre mensajera.”

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14. “Pero toda derrota contiene su cielo por ganar. Porque ha comenzado inesperada, súbita la hora fantasma donde volveremos a ganar las calles y el territorio, de una nueva y vieja ilusión, reinventando el ánimo y la sonrisa.”

Chapter Three

Unsettling the Archive De monstruos y faldas by Carolina Astudillo

To define what I term “unsettling nostalgia” is to trace its sources in a dual longing. It emerges from a desire to salvage compelling stories of revolutionary struggle to enchant the disenchanted present. At the same time, it springs from a need to historicize and confront the complex factors and unresolved conflicts, dilemmas, and contradictions that have shaped such struggles. These two inclinations appear to be incompatible, but the previous two chapters illustrate how they might coexist in post-dictatorial literature and film. While unsettling nostalgia has not emerged as a widespread phenomenon, it may be characterized as a cultural current that unfolds on screen and the page, and that prompts viewers and readers to regard the past anew. As the previous chapter explains, films like Calle Santa Fe contribute to our understanding of the ways in which women involved in the anti-Pinochet underground often contended with a twofold challenge: to fight against the misogynist violence of the right-wing military junta, and additionally to deal with the paradoxes concerning gender among the parties of the left. The film complicates romantic idealizations of leftist militants by creating a disquieting nostalgic portrait of mothers and daughters whose memories bring out the gendered dimensions of political resistance. When we turn to the case of Spain in search of documentaries that challenge us to think about the complexities of women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War and the anti-Franco underground, several films stand out. Some examples include De toda la vida (1986) by Lisa Berger and Carol Mazer, Mujeres en pie de guerra (2004) by Susana Koska, Las silenciadas (2011) by Pablo Ces, Guillena 1937 (2013) by Mariano Agudo, and La madre sola (2010) by Miguel Paredes. Particularly salient, and relevant to 97

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this book, are the feature and short documentaries of the Barcelona-based Chilean filmmaker Carolina Astudillo for their atypical representation of the intersections of gender, politics, and clandestine resistance in the Spanish postwar period. Born in 1975, Astudillo spent her childhood under the Pinochet regime and came of age at a time when military intervention was still framed in the official discourse as the most viable response to political conflict. During the 1990s, Astudillo studied journalism at the University of Santiago and experienced the transition to democracy as a young adult. Given the militarized climate of surveillance and patriarchal control in which she spent her adolescence, it is unsurprising that she found striking parallels between the Spanish and Chilean dictatorships. In the 2000s, she moved to Catalonia to study nonfiction film and began her career with a twenty-four-minute piece called De monstruos y faldas (2008) for the master’s program in creative documentary at the Universitat Antónoma de Barcelona. As a poetic film without a single scripted voice of authority or plotline, Astudillo’s point of view is implicit. The voice of the documentary speaks to us through the juxtaposition of 1940s-era footage with the perspectives of four grown children of women political prisoners as a way to understand responses to the structures of violence integral to the Franco regime. For its stunning vision of women’s resistance to an entire network of patriarchal institutions and practices in postwar Spain, De monstruos y faldas will be the focus of this chapter. Astudillo conveys that vision through experimental cinematic practices that markedly depart from conventional methods. To contextualize the short film and to lay the foundation for my argument that frames Astudillo’s unsettling nostalgia as a political act that exposes the conditions that shape repression and resistance, we must first place it within the cultural milieu in which it was produced. Astudillo’s narrative position as a filmmaker developed against the backdrop of collective disenchantment with the shortcomings of the transitional governments in both Chile and Spain to generate deeper forms of social justice and post-dictatorial redress. Her films also bespeak the shared interest among a younger generation of Chilean and Spanish filmmakers in recovering untold stories of the predictatorial pasts and the massive mobilizations that characterized them. Importantly, these were periods that they never experienced directly as adults. As Alice Nelson correctly argues, the sense of disenchantment for those who lived through the Allende years as young adults and those who only knew militarized society is significantly different: “If the older generation had loved and lost in its experience with the Popular Unity, the younger generation never had loved at all. As Popular Unity had by the 1980s become part of a mythical past (gone the way of other large or totalizing narratives), the older generation felt bitter loss of having once believed in collective myths, while the younger generation simply yearned to believe- despite cynicism- in

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the possibility of telling stories at all” (Nelson 2002: 119). Although Nelson does not say so directly, her reflection contributes to a larger discussion involving “postmemory.” While the introduction to this book has already rehearsed the key arguments about postmemory put forth originally by Holocaust scholars and then expanded by numerous Latin Americanists and Peninsularists, it is useful to return to Hirsch’s canonical text Family Frames to consider how Astudillo’s documentaries bring complexity to our understanding of postmemory. The term refers to the memories of a generation of children who have come of age in the wake of mass atrocity crimes and have experienced the effects of state violence in relation to their parents and grandparents. Hirsch defines postmemory as “a very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997, 22). Hirsch discusses the stakes of this mediated and creative process in her most recent elaboration of the paradigm-shifting concept, asking, “What do we owe the victims? How can we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them?” (Hirsch 2012, 2). The value of the generational framework is significant insofar as it provides a vocabulary to contribute to an “evolving ethical and theoretical discussion about the workings of trauma, memory, and intergenerational acts of transfer” (Hirsch 2012, 2). But as with any generation or period, we must be cautious of categorical or prescriptive definitions. I agree with Fredric Jameson, who suggests that period concepts and generational logic are classificatory systems that often seek a totality that does not entirely reflect the heterogeneity of experience (Jameson 2003, 229). In the case of Chile and Spain, the postmemory (or postdictatorship) generation spans over decades. How might the experience of those who were born during the Allende years differ from those born in the context of the 1989 plebiscite? The same could be asked in the Spanish context if we take, for instance, those born in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s, all unique generations that nevertheless fit under the rubric of postmemory. If we narrow the scope to the generation of Spanish or Chilean filmmakers born around the 1970s, we find a number of noteworthy examples of recent documentaries, including El edificio de los Chilenos (2010) by Macarena Aguiló, Mi vida con Carlos (2010) by Germán BergerHertz, Muerte en el Valle (2005) by C.M. Hardt, De monstruos y faldas (2008) and El gran vuelo (2014) by Carolina Astudillo. These films, among others, constitute not only powerful denunciations of right-wing authoritarian practices but also vehicles to reclaim a collective identity against the militaristic, patriarchal, and nationalist ideology of the regimes. Astudillo’s eye-catching cinematic form of storytelling, combined with the feminist lens with which she examines dictatorial violence, make her

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documentaries exceptionally relevant to this book. Unlike the other filmmakers listed above, Astudillo moves away from the reflexive and performative modes that explicitly focus on the filmmakers’ point of view through onscreen introspection and self-questioning. That is not to say that the other modes are less valuable or relevant. As the previous chapter explains, Carmen Castillo adopts reflexive and performative strategies in Calle Santa Fe to convey an unsettling nostalgia. Astudillo, on the other hand, brings together the expository and poetic modes by re-contextualizing found and archival footage. De monstruos y faldas reflects the filmmaker’s influences, namely the French documentarian Chris Marker whose cinematic collage Grin Without A Cat (1978) rejects traditional film formulas to grapple with the struggles of the New Left after 1968 in Latin American and Europe. Innovative in her own right, Astudillo combines archival sequences with b-roll video of symbolic images, animation, and expressive sound to reanimate the past and to inspire viewers to break through dominant perspectives of the Spanish Civil War and postwar. 1 I examine De monstruos y faldas in this book alongside the previous chapter on Castillo’s Calle Santa Fe to enable a thought-provoking comparative reflection on different cinematic manifestations of unsettling nostalgia. The inclusion of Astudillo’s documentaries in this book also stems from an understanding of the significance of both her transatlantic trajectory and Janus-like critical lens that focuses on the past and present in Spain and Chile alike. Her cutting-edge engagement with the histories of the Pinochet and Franco regimes profoundly resonates with the broader claims in Unsettling Nostalgia, which underscore the political, historical, cultural, and artistic connections between these two contexts. Although Astudillo’s films deal with each separately, they share key thematic threads that reveal her knowledge of the relationships between movements in 1930s Spain and early 1970s Chile to end institutionalized inequality. They also show her grasp of the network of gendered ideologies that have informed dictatorial violence in both areas. Viewed together, her documentaries encourage us to think of these political systems within a wider connective framework populated by actors that have exercised repressive policies on one hand, and those who have contested them on the other. If Astudillo’s films have only received scant attention, this chapter shows that it is not due to a lack of originality or significance. Film scholar Laia Quílez Esteve has blazed the trail, offering a perceptive analysis of Astudillo’s work, claiming that she “recovers distant images, turning them into essays about the complicated situation of women during the war and the post-war period in Spain through the process of enlargement, fragmentation and even the alteration of their original speed, thus re-signifying them” (83). Whereas Quílez Esteve focuses primarily on El gran vuelo to show how Astudillo denounces the roles, spaces, and images imposed by patriarchal

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society, this chapter focuses on how De monstruos y faldas adopts an unsettling nostalgic perspective to portray women who defied such prescriptive gender roles. In what follows, I will first illustrate the cinematic strategies that Astudillo uses to acknowledge the particularities of women’s experiences at Les Corts Women’s Prison in postwar Barcelona in relation to a longer history of gender socialization, social policing, and misogyny. In the second section of this chapter, I will give examples of how nostalgic memories of meaningful, exciting, and brave acts of defiance sit alongside anti-nostalgic revelations involving the long-term consequences of political imprisonment and imposed familial fragmentation. Through the composition of archival sequences together with the music, sounds, and disembodied voices of the interviewees that accompany the shots, De monstruos y faldas moves beyond reductive representations of women as merely passive victims stripped of personhood. By transmitting an unsettling nostalgic vision of women as active and complex political subjects, De monstruos y faldas transforms masculinist narratives that diminish women’s agency. Astudillo responds to the atrocities of the Franco regime by prompting viewers to confront systems of violence and to consider how those systems have been challenged. Viewers are faced with stories of degradation and trauma experienced by women and their children, but we are also exposed to stories of resilience and courage. De monstruos y faldas thus changes the way we conceptualize state violence and ultimately sharpens our often-dulled analytical skills, thereby moving us toward a more nuanced understanding of gender, violence, resistance, and nostalgia. SEWING MACHINES, SKIRTS, RIFLES AND MONSTERS Adeptly conceptualized and edited, the first sequence combines b-roll visual material in color with found and archival black and white footage to capture the audience without verbal commentary. Astudillo pulls viewers in with a tight close-up shot of the key parts of a 1940s era sewing machine: the needle, the bobbin, the pressure controlling knobs and the metal wheel. The heavy and rhythmic sound of the piercing needle is critical, bringing the antique sewing machine to life while building tension around this highly symbolic device. The visual b-roll material of the sewing machine in full color is then juxtaposed with a black and white image of another gendered symbol: a gun. Archival footage of the Spanish Civil War features a man firing a rifle out of a window. Between the shots of the sewing machine and the shot of the gun is a woman jumping off a high dive into deep water followed by an image of an explosion. The combination of these images is redolent of the history of women’s bold and risky submersion in revolutionary politics. The jump is accentuated by the sound of a jagged and repetitive

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melodic piece played on the viola, which is soon accompanied by a low pitch cello. The viola suggests ongoing anxiety while the deeper sound of the cello captures a feeling of sustained dread. These four sounds merge evocatively with footage of war-torn Spain curated to specifically focus attention on women and children witnessing violence and fleeing hardship. Soon the vibration of the needle and the booming of the rifle appear as if they were one. The opening two-minute sequence is brief but captivating. The strategic collapse of the distinction between the sounds of the rifle and the sewing machine triggers discomfort and raises questions about the damaging effects of both within the gendered system that they have come to represent. The score draws us in, breaking through expectations as it affects our perception of juxtaposed images, thereby prompting us to see each image from a new perspective. The sewing machine is an emblematic object; a well-worn image associated with women’s work. Yet its enlargement and juxtaposition with the rifle ask viewers to pause to reimagine its significance. The sewing machine evokes 1940s Spain and the patriarchal values and ideologies that relegated women to the domestic sphere during the Franco regime. The device was also a tool of subjugation within the prison system. Female inmates, most of whom were imprisoned for their political opposition to the military dictatorship, were to ‘redeem’ themselves through forced labor. The militaristic culture of the regime legitimized such violence through a national Catholic discourse. Euphemisms served to facilitate the elimination of political conflict and the reinforcement of class and gender hierarchies, which were deemed natural and ordained by God. An animated sequence later in the film returns to the sewing trope to allude to the silencing of women’s voices, and more specifically dissident voices. Needles and thread stitch up a woman’s mouth, which becomes detached from her body. The message is clear: the sewing machine represents oppressive gender norms. But it also symbolizes the creative task of the filmmaker—sewing together stories of lives that were torn asunder by militarized culture and patriarchal violence. Astudillo weaves together visual and chronicled fragments in a decidedly imperfect narrative form, resembling the patchwork of memory. The opening montage sets the stage for the autobiographical commentaries by adult children of former women political prisoners. Both memory and forgetting inevitably play a role in their process of recollection since they are at least in their seventies at the time that Astudillo made the film. The filmmaker makes evident her understanding of the complexities of remembrance in the fragmentary documentary form that breaks away from the traditional talking-head interview and the authoritative voiceover that often attempts to create a smooth and coherent narrative. Color images of the four family members in the present only appear after the first sequence and at the end of the film, but their brief and interlaced voiceover narratives shape the

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archival footage that we see. It is the configuration of the commentary, sound, editing, and animation that allows the filmmaker to reframe previously marginalized, distorted, or repressed stories of clandestine resistance while at the same time recognizing their incomplete nature. The goal is not to erect a singular mythical narrative of anti-fascist militancy, but rather to enrich our understanding of a range of experiences through a departure from formulaic modes of storytelling. One of the ways that the filmmaker accomplishes this is through the selection of the interviewees. Of the four, the arguably anti-nostalgic portrait is conveyed by Albert Pueyo whose aunt, Clara Pueyo Jornet, was briefly exiled in France in 1939, then detained and incarcerated in 1941 in Les Corts Women’s Prison for her underground activities with the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC). Along with other female resistors, she worked in an establishment in the neighborhood of La Barceloneta called the “Oasis,” which was a place where women would meet to sew and embroider. Secretly, however, it functioned as a storeroom for planning and propaganda. As Quílez Esteve observes, “the women disguised themselves as the angels in the house to subvert the system” (84). After the regime’s agents raided the Oasis in 1941, Clara Pueyo Jornet was imprisoned and tortured. As recalled by her nephew in the film, the interrogators at the prison shattered both of her shoulder blades. Then, under mysterious circumstances, she escaped and virtually disappeared without a trace. She was only twenty-seven years old. The narrative of the allusive figure of Clara Pueyo Jornet is so evocative that it takes center stage in Astudillo’s feature-length film El gran vuelo, produced in 2014, six years after De monstruos y faldas. As Quílez Esteve argues, “the crux of the film lies in the process of disillusionment that Pueyo experienced within the party for which she fought” (89). While some think that she escaped to Russia and fell into anonymity, others believe that she was a victim of the PSUC leadership that distrusted her for her sexual relationships and indiscretions. It is in that film, El gran vuelo, that Astudillo dives into the details of the complex lives of women militants. Similar to Carmen Castillo in Calle Santa Fe, Astudillo makes a powerful commentary about the patriarchal structures that dominated not only the National-Catholic right-wing but also the left-wing resistance. What is most compelling about the audiovisual material that features the story of Clara Pueyo in De monstruos y faldas is the way in which it challenges the longer history of gender socialization that restricted women’s roles and punished them if they did not conform. When Clara’s surviving nephew, Albert, describes in voice-off narration that as a child he viewed his aunt as a criminal, we see a black and white wide shot of a woman pushing a baby carriage on a path in a forested park. The idyllic sound of birds overlays the following full-body shot of a young boy drinking from a fountain. Connotative links between the found footage of the park and Albert Pueyo’s com-

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mentary are not explicitly conveyed to viewers. Instead, their disjuncture raises questions and generates thought. By foregrounding an image of acceptable womanhood, Astudillo invites viewers to reflect on the social conditioning that shaped Albert Pueyo’s negative views of his aunt. It is significant that shortly after this sequence, another interviewee explains how the regime's agent detained her mother for insubordination. In that segment, archival footage of a 1940s printing press overlays the voiceover: “She was arrested and tried as a ‘Real Monster in a Skirt.’” Astudillo takes her title from that newspaper headline, changing it to Of Monsters and Skirts. In a clever turn, Astudillo cuts from the printing press to a bird’s eye view archival shot that looks down on a little girl reading a newspaper. These strategies allow for a thought-provoking rhetorical intervention. By positioning the Pueyo interview alongside the park images and the newspaper headlines, the film fosters a critique of the constraining societal norms that demonized women like Clara Pueyo Jornet and framed the female figure as inherently and exclusively maternal. THE NORMALIZATION OF GENDERED VIOLENCE IN FRANCO’S SPAIN In arguing that Astudillo highlights the repressive codes of behavior that women were expected to embrace during the Franco years, it is instructive to consider De monstruos y faldas with Carmen Martín Gaite’s nonfiction text Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain (1987, 2004). Martín Gaite (1925–2000) explains that the ideology of subjugation permeated all levels of society. The surveillance culture of the Church and State functioned to enforce that ideology: “We grew up under the watch of those two faces, one with the white skullcap and one with his little mustache. . . . Their gazes were watchful, severe, waiting for the slightest sign of insubordination.” (2004, 23). These two symbolic images are at the same time, gendered and militarized. Both Martín Gaite and Astudillo cite newspapers from the Franco period that shed light on the social construction of gender and how it served to ensure the economic and political dominance of men. As Helen Graham notes in the essay “Gender and the State: Women in the 1940s,” Women were envisioned as the source not only of physical reproduction (i.e., babies for the patria) but also “correct” ideological reproduction via the socialization of children in the home—the goal here being the imposition of a social hierarchy. But to ensure this outcome, the state could not really afford to let the private sphere remain entirely “private.” Control, especially of women, had to be enforced. Women thus became the target both of a cult of morality and of the educational and low-level welfare ministrations of state agencies. Al-

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though the Church should be included in this category, predominant here was the Sección Femenina de Falange. (Graham and Labanyi 1995, 187)

Women and men were taught to understand life through a lens in which domestic femininity and militarized masculinity were not only normalized but praised ad nauseam through the education system and state-controlled media outlets. In De monstruos y faldas Astudillo illustrates the enormous role of these institutions by intercutting shots of men, women, boys, and girls reading newspapers throughout the film. But the documentary archive does not function as a heavy-handed, didactic illustration of what the testimonies relate. Instead of explicitly telling us that militarized men were depicted as inherently dominant over women, Astudillo shows us through a profoundly moving visual system. She invites viewers into the questioning process by taking incomplete cues and allowing viewers to reconstruct images. How were narratives about women political prisoners constructed in Francoist discourse and disseminated in media outlets? How did misogynist ideology and euphemistic discourse lay the foundation for the perpetration of violence against female prisoners and later justify it in the aftermath? Ultimately, the achievement of De monstruos y faldas does not involve the direct representation of such violence, but rather the collage of gendered symbols that provide an opportunity to identify the broader societal inequalities and masculinist conventions that shaped the structures of violence perpetrated against politically active women. We consider how figures like Clara Pueyo Jornet were portrayed by the regime’s champions as the ultimate transgressors of societal norms and consequently without bodily integrity or a legitimate claim to human rights. Instead of reinforcing the otherness of gendered violence, De monstruos y faldas uses an experimental documentary form to ask viewers to consider the discourses and institutions in which violence emerges (Wunker 2016, 62). In this way, it unmasks the normalization of misogyny that makes political detainment and the torture of women prisoners like Clara Pueyo Jornet possible. The complexity with which the filmmaker treats the overarching theme of institutionalized violence against women is what makes the film so significant. Astudillo prompts viewers to consider how political violence is not only gendered but shaped by a patriarchal culture that applauds aggressive masculinity and sanctions militarized methods of social control. When male authority over women is exalted and female empowerment is framed as unnatural, then the detainment and torture of militant women is not merely an aberrant act of violence, but a pillar in the larger structure of subjugation. 2

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UNSETTLING NOSTALGIA IN OF MONSTERS AND SKIRTS To this point, I have emphasized how Astudillo re-contextualizes archival footage as a creative and critical response to the hierarchical militarized Francoist state in Spain. In that cinematic response, she suggests that militarism stemmed from a society steeped in patriarchal culture and conditioned by unequal power relations that media outlets repeatedly reinforced over decades. De monstruos y faldas allows us to conceptualize the entanglement between gender and violence by calling attention to how they emerge and intersect. Instead of framing the war and dictatorship from a gender-blind hegemonic perspective, Astudillo traces the links between gender and violence and the wide-ranging effects of patriarchal culture. Now, I would like to argue that De monstruos y faldas also nostalgically portrays multiple forms of resistance that have emerged as another kind of critical response to militaristic patriarchal ideology. Her meticulous search in film archives is not for bygone utopias, but for acts of political consciousness and defiance against the many restrictions that shaped women’s lives within the confines of Francoist military vigilance. Because the film does not include a voice-of-authority narration, the filmmaker’s point of view becomes manifest in the selection and arrangement of sound, image, and text. It is within that audiovisual system that we may begin to trace the nature of Astudillo’s nostalgic aesthetic mode. The Courier font, perhaps the most recognizable typeface of the twentieth century, is used in the film for the title and credits and reminds viewers, nostalgically, of a pre-digital time. The Courier font appears on the white screen in faded black with the accompanying analog sound of a typewriter, thereby setting the tone of the entire film. It is as if a vintage machine were scripting the words of the title, letter by letter. Astudillo’s extensive use of the archive, for both video footage and photographic stills, builds the nostalgic tenor and becomes the most distinguishing characteristic of the film. That cinematic practice of drawing from the archive is grounded in her voracious appetite for previous forms of image-making. As revealed in a 2018 interview, her longing for an earlier age of photography is driven by a disillusionment with the saturation of images in what she deems a post-photography age. 3 At a time dominated by the ephemeral Facebook or Snapchat post, she worries that the concept of the archive has deteriorated and that the value of the photograph has become obsolete. Looking to the past, she laments the loss of a time when portraits were prized in the family album. Although it may seem contradictory or counterintuitive, Astudillo’s nostalgia allows her to transform old-fashioned or even fossilized forms like photographs and newsreel footage into cutting-edge art that activates our senses and destabilizes sexist and nationalist visions of roots, family, and nation.

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The opening sequence combines archival footage with stills that spotlight women and children experiencing extreme adversity. The filmmaker mobilizes otherwise static images, taking them out of what Barthes has conceptualized as a “flat death” or “the realm of stasis, immobility, mortification” (cited in Hirsch 1997, 4). Viewers witness a repetition of specific images, but with each replay the filmmaker zooms in a measure in step with the soundtrack, illuminating details otherwise ignored. In a wide shot of a crowd running in fear, the filmmaker magnifies one woman falling to her knees. The enlargement of the detail prompts viewers to regard what is routinely disregarded. A tight close-up of a woman holding a child in a war zone reappears, testifying to a story of rupture and trauma that is shot through with the gendered experience of motherhood. While the image is tragic, the dynamic musical score that overlays it casts the mother’s gaze as resilient. Footage of nurses caring for the injured and rifle-wielding milicianas in blue overalls at the barricades reinforces that depiction of strength and endurance while representing a range of experiences. These are illustrations of how the nostalgic search for images of a previous moment of Republican resistance cannot be separated from issues of gender. As the other chapters in this book argue, the relationship between nostalgic longing and socially constructed structures of identity are bound together. It is appropriate to reiterate a central premise that I established in the introduction. Nostalgic return is a voyage in time and place that is inevitably intersected by the remembering subject’s understanding of hierarchies of power. To long for particular sites and milieus—and the people that once inhabited them—involves perceptions of times unavoidably embedded in political struggles to either uphold or upend unequal power relations. The sound of the 1940s sewing machine in the montage sequence that introduces the film is doubly significant. While the object evokes the gendered mechanisms of the Francoist state, as I previously explained, the arresting sound that characterizes the machine’s function also reflects principled resistance. The pounding quality of the sewing machine enhances the other component in this montage, which involves the footage of a diver intercut with an explosion. The seamstress creates, while the diver plunges into danger. This montage blends rather than explains. With an original voice, it speaks to the challenges that women faced, but it also celebrates the audacity with which they met such challenges. Multiple moments in the film substantiate this interpretation of Astudillo’s portrayal, including one sequence that captures a group of women marching forward. It is, in fact, the combination of the sound, framing, and organization of scenes that presents the action as a march rather than a mere walk. Preceding that particular footage is a voiceover commentary by Enriqueta Borrás, one of the daughters of a political prisoner who describes the circumstances of her mother’s detainment. Borrás explains, “She was sen-

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tenced to twelve years and one day for supporting the rebellion. Oh, how I love those words!” The relationship between Borrás’s vindication of dissent and the subsequent marching scene is not accidental. A close-up archival shot centers on women’s high-heeled shoes, legs, and skirts. The camera then gradually travels vertically to a full body shot of the entire group of women walking arm-in-arm. The deceleration of the footage as they step, coupled with a steady beat replicating a march, encourages viewers to pause and see these women as visionaries and rebels. If the military regime framed Republican women as threatening and monstrous through a highly controlled misogynist public discourse, then filmmakers like Astudillo reclaim and subvert such terms by endowing them with power. Another way in which the film succeeds in disrupting established modes of representation is through the selection and juxtaposition of oral accounts. When we turn specifically to the interviews with the three daughters of former political prisoners, we find that their narratives contrast remarkably with the commentary by the only male interviewee. We should recall that Albert Pueyo communicates a sense of distance and disconnection from his aunt Clara Pueyo Jornet. By contrast, the postwar daughters featured in the film suggest that despite the pressures of social policing, they formed heterogeneous and competing images of femininity and motherhood. In order to frame the unsettling nostalgic commentary featured in De monstruos y faldas, it is enlightening to return to Martín Gaite’s Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain. She suggests that for the children of the early 1940s, memories of politically active Republican women incongruously sat alongside the static image of ideal womanhood promoted by the Franco regime. “Grandmother with her prayer book and perennial mantilla coexisted with another kind of woman, from the female soldier to the ‘vamp’ from the scholar with her fellowship for work abroad, to the woman who makes speeches at rallies. They saw such women photographed in magazines, smoking, legs crossed, driving a car, or looking at bacteria through a microscope. These children heard of talks of strikes, of debates in Parliament, of emancipation, of secular education, of divorce.” (Martín Gaite 27). De monstruos y faldas does not merely immortalize or romanticize the past as utopia, but rather illustrates these tensions as experienced and remembered by the daughters of imprisoned women. The story of Libertad Canela and her mother, Francisca Conejeros, illustrates the many dimensions of unsettling nostalgia and its relationship to identity. Her recollections of a troubled childhood marked by loss and disenfranchisement curiously come together with positive memories of bonding and non-conformism as exemplified by her parents. Her mother was imprisoned at Les Corts Women’s Prison while her father was forced into exile in France. In one telling vignette, Libertad looks back on the significance of her name, which means freedom. Her story is incomplete, but we can speculate

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that because she lived in the streets in abject poverty, she had no option but to turn to the Church for shelter. She recounts that their aid would come at a high price: she was nearly forced to change her name by baptism and, by extension, renounce the political and secular identity of her mother. She fondly remembers her mother’s daring refusal to consent to the erasure of her daughter’s given name. As viewers listen to Libertad’s evocative narrative of this unforgettable moment, we see archival footage of large ring and stick. It is an old child’s game called “hoop rolling” widely played for ages among different societies. The goal of the game is to keep the hoop upright and to perform clever maneuvers with it. As Libertad voices her childhood fear of the imposed disavowal of her name, the hoop falls to the ground. When she says in the voiceover that her mother refused to agree, the footage is played in reverse. The hoop defies gravity and is resurrected. In a symbolic gesture, it returns to the young girl who was originally playing with it. Astudillo resignifies found footage of childhood play to project a story of women’s resistance to the National-Catholic patriarchal order. Equally illuminating for our conceptualization of unsettling nostalgia are the memories that Libertad evokes about the community that she forged among the marginalized children of postwar Barcelona. She explains that she has many memories of those sad prison visits, but apart from several episodes, they managed to make friendships. They would play in the courtyard and go into the communication area together to see their mothers. As Libertad speaks, a faint sound of a lullaby overlays footage of young girls enjoying themselves in a pool. Later she states that for the people who surrounded her, the war did not end in 1939, but “despite all that,” she found “solidarity.” These scenes can be interpreted in two ways. On the one hand, Astudillo creates a striking mismatch between a voiceover narrative of suffering and scenes of well-being to project the schism between the experience of the defeated Republicans and the Francoist victors. Following this logic, idyllic pictures of comfort and innocence allude to a time of peace. But coupled with the voiceover, the filmmaker reminds us of the repression hiding behind such images. On the other hand, the endearing portrait of youth functions to heighten the tinge of nostalgia with which Libertad recollects her childhood. Although she may not wish to return to the time-place of the postwar, viewers observe how she associates it with a sense of shared values, unity, and collective Republican identity against the National-Catholic logic. Interpreted from either standpoint, Astudillo’s cinematic strategies complicate any simplistic view of nostalgia as a mindless retreat. The selection of memories of solidarity can be viewed as a conscious effort to counter the regime’s destructive narrative and as a tool to vindicate an identity while mitigating the pain of loss. As I explained in the introduction, these findings intersect with Sara Horowitz’s discoveries as described in the essay “Nostalgia and the Holo-

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caust” (2010). Horowitz contends that “Conventionally, nostalgic remembrances gesture toward representations of a golden era (home), followed by catastrophe (separation from or destruction of that home).” That pattern, Horowitz observes, has shifted in recent texts penned by a younger generation of writers: “The Holocaust is constructed as a time when—whether by choice or by coercion—all Jews were one people. This vision of lost unity is posed against, and also offered as an antidote to, the perceived fragmentation” of Jewish community (Horowitz 2010, 51). As I will explain the next chapter titled “Postwar Prison Nostalgia,” the novel La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón exemplifies how this pattern emerges in narratives written by a generation of Spanish authors that did not experience the postwar directly. However, as Libertad’s commentary in De monstruos y faldas reveals, postwar nostalgia is not limited to a younger generation. In both cases, it is not that the horror of the postwar is absent in these representations. “Rather, the horror sits incongruously beside these gestures of nostalgia” (Horowitz 2010, 56). The unsettling nature of nostalgia also surfaces saliently in the reflections of Enriqueta Borrás, daughter of Rosa Mateu. As I previously stated, Borrás’s mother was sentenced to twelve years in prison for supporting “the rebellion,” a term that Borrás reclaims and celebrates in the documentary. In narrating the relationship that she had with her mother, she affirms an ethical and cultural attachment to the history of women’s anti-fascist resistance. But rather than bury uncomfortable or conflicting memories of her mother, she allows them to interpolate and transform otherwise glowing vignettes. The audiovisual material magnifies that complexity. In her first comment, she states that her mother was absent. Astudillo combines the commentary with an off-tripod shaky and out-of-focus video of the passageways in what seems to be an outdoor labyrinth. The accompanying sound replicates gusts of wind. The handheld tracking shot conveys to viewers that we are going down memory lane, but that the foggy lens of time will inevitably cloud our gaze. When Borrás speaks of her mother, she offers anecdotal and impressionistic stories. Astudillo couples them with intriguing images that destabilize the reductive effects of stereotypes. In one sequence, she describes how she responded to her mother’s absence within a society that deemed women’s political activism as transgressive. Similar to the case of Libertad, we can conjecture that Borrás lived at an orphanage like the Auxilio Social or some other form of residential institution for the care of children whose parents were detained, deceased, or extremely impoverished. Since the other children had visitors on the weekends while her parents were both in prison, she “invented” an image of a mother for the adults at the institution and herself. The filmmaker brilliantly constructs this scene to underscore the significance of a child’s vivid imagination and her creative strategies for survival. Borrás’s comments overlay archival footage of a woman looking in a mirror

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as she applies red lipstick. The footage seems to be a 1940s advertisement for a makeup vanity. It is a curious contraption from which two mechanical arms emerge with powder puffs. As it playfully dusts the model’s cheeks, we hear Borrás’s laughter. Told in this way, this story and its unconventional framing, work to bring a range of experiences out from underneath the blanket of gender-blind generalizations about the postwar and political persecution. Hearing Borrás’s account of her mother’s release from prison also offers a revealing window into the ways in which Republican women and their daughters have grappled with Francoist revenge and its lasting consequences. She explains that by the time her mother was released from a twelve-year prison sentence, she was fifteen years old: My mother and I had, naturally, a huge generational conflict. My mother wanted to experience the period that she hadn’t been able to live. She wanted to dress me up and do things for me. She would frequently say, “I have to take care of my little girl.” What little girl? Little girl? I was already fifteen years old and was working like mad because no one would give her a job.

By including these difficult memories, the film refuses to construct a smooth or easy narrative, and much less culminate in either a categorically tragic or conversely happy ending. Instead, the film blurs these boundaries, working to convey the gendered experiences of vulnerability and courage, division and connection, loss and recovery. While Borrás gives voice to the tensions that imprisonment produced, the account of the fourth and final interviewee, Maricarmen Gualleros, daughter of Isabel Cánovas, mostly accentuates the beauty and bravery of a militant mother and her sacrifice. The body language and facial expressions of these two interviewees seem to communicate this difference. Borrás looks directly into the camera through dark sunglasses, while Gualleros gazes up to the sky with a smile. In one brief illustration of an episode that took place in a courthouse, Gualleros tells the story of her mother’s defense of the Mossos d’Esquadra, the autonomous police force that had sided with the Generalitat de Catalunya and was dissolved by the Francoist forces after the war. Along with their families, they asked for clemency. Gualleros asserts that after the Civil Guard violently chastised the Mossos for not speaking Castilian, her mother intervened by raising her fist at the authorities. This account is set over archival footage of women and men marching together with their fists clenched in solidarity. The film then cuts to an image of a printing press while Gualleros recounts how her mother was severely punished for that act of resistance. After the regime’s agents smashed her face and chest with a musket, they arrested her. Later, she was put on trial as “A Real Monster in a Skirt.” The film cuts to a printing press in the 1940s and then features multiple shots of children and adults reading the newspaper. As I explained

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earlier, those curated images and their strategic sequence encourage viewers to consider the role of the media in the dissemination of Francoist ideology and the demonization of Republican women. These scenes move beyond gender-neutral conceptualizations of state violence and raise questions about the social significance of gender socialization and militarization. Such a move sheds light on the extensive sources that produce authoritarian regimes as well as the misogynist rhetoric and repression that such systems generate. The guard who brutalized and publicly humiliated Gualleros’s mother, as well as the newspaper that villainized her and the officials that found her guilty in a kangaroo court, subscribed to and enforced sexist assumptions about models of ideal Catholic femininity that were inextricably bound to the glorification of passivity and maternal selfsacrifice. Again, the resemblance between the Spanish case and the Chilean case is hard to ignore. Thirty years after the early Franco years, the Pinochet regime’s agents aggressively defended the notion that respectable Chilean womanhood necessarily involved devotion to the patriarch and the children. As Cynthia Enloe maintains, “A woman who strayed from this model, who participated in all-women anti-Pinochet rallies, who organized soup kitchens in the urban shantytowns, thereby surrendered her protective shield of respectability. She deserved to be raped, to be treated by the government’s men as a ‘whore.’ By choosing to discard her cloak of feminized respectability, she was asking for it” (Enloe 2000, 130). Without collapsing difference, a similar statement could be made of Franco’s Spain. De monstruos y faldas makes us think about how the figures of the civil guard, the legal system, and the media, all contributed to the normalization of ideas about acceptable Spanish womanhood and the justification of violence against women who did not comply. It also moves us to view forms of transgression within such a hostile environment as extraordinary. The story of compassion and heroism that Gualleros conveys about her mother, as well as Astudillo’s framing of it, comes across as more nostalgic in comparison with Borrás’s account; however, it is not without complexity. The painful stories of prison life that Gualleros tells in the film reveal that her mother shared a great deal with her daughter, who in turn, became an empathetic listener. In one sequence, she reflects on the obscure history of depression and morphine use among women political prisoners sentenced to death. As Gualleros attempts to paint a picture of their state of constant fear, the filmmaker places before us several audiovisual metaphors. For instance, we see archival footage of a boat adrift with several out-of-focus figures slumped over like corpses. This metaphor symbolizes the destabilizing impact of trauma so unspeakable that it calls for unconventional forms of representation. This scene demonstrates how Astudillo challenges traditional approaches to documentary filmmaking that, as Stella Bruzzi suggests, seek to ‘represent an uncomplicated, descriptive relationship between subject and

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text’ (Bruzzi 2006, 187). Using innovative strategies, Astudillo magnifies the fractured nature of memories and their uneasy narration in the present. If we recall the previous chapter on Calle Santa Fe, we find striking parallels in relation to these scenes. While some daughters conveyed to Castillo the tensions that have marked their relationships with their mothers for their political activism, others showed a significant commitment to their mothers’ stories. Castillo’s interviews in Calle Santa Fe demonstrate that the mother-daughter relationship, based on empathy and a regard for memory, might contribute to a sense of identity as well as a capacity for caring attachment to communities. In De monstruos y faldas Maricarmen Gualleros ends her accounts with the following words: “My mother was in jail, but because of her ideals, not for murder or theft. She has taught that to her three children, and we have taught that to ours.” As her voice cracks, she says. “A beautiful woman, my mother. Not only beautiful but also very brave.” Following these words, we see a creased and faded photograph of two little girls smiling, followed by another still of a political prisoner with her daughter sitting on her lap. We can only assume that the image we see is of Gualleros and her mother at Les Corts Women’s Prison. The film soon ends the way it began, with b-roll footage of a 1940s sewing machine. This time the sound that accompanies the image seems less suspenseful and more mournful as it combines with a Spanish guitar. The rhythm of the sewing machine is nevertheless persistent and determined, reflecting the ongoing need to stitch together stories of the long-standing legacy of Francoist violence at a time when the number of first-generation survivors of the Spanish Civil War is quickly decreasing. That act of sewing becomes a metaphor for storytelling and repair, however slight. The film constitutes an imaginative response to patriarchal ideology and how the Francoist version of history has been constructed and used. With its multiple narrators, thematic complexity, and fragmentary organization, the film denaturalizes the underlying misogynist beliefs that shaped the regime’s practices. It also deepens our understanding of traumatic memories rooted in dictatorial repression that had deeply engrained gender specificities. At the same time, it calls our attention to various nostalgic responses and the ways in which unsettling nostalgia might become a tool to reclaim histories of resistance while bringing out their profound complexities. SITES AND PALIMPSESTS Before concluding, I would like to turn to the filmmaker’s unique framing of the women’s prison since it invokes some of the core issues in the book, including the relationship between sites, nostalgia, and resistance through reclamation and recontextualization. The sequence begins with a voiceover

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narrative by Albert Pueyo, who explains that Les Corts Women’s Prison was originally a convent. Looking beyond Pueyo’s brief remarks, we find that it was converted to La Prisión Provincial de Mujeres de Barcelona during the Republic. With the entry of the Francoist troops in Barcelona in January 1939, Les Corts became a prison governed by a religious order for the detainment of leftist women. By 1939 there were about two thousand inmates, with more than forty children. Inmates were exploited through forced labor, and at least ten women were executed (Herná ndez Holgado, 2008). As Pueyo suggests in the voiceover, the prison was later transformed into the well-known department store El Corte Inglés in the bustling Diagonal Avenue. The evocation of the place’s multiple uses enables a disruptive reflection on the links between socio-political histories and alerts us to specific continuities. It is hard, for example, to ignore the relationship between the site’s names. The term les corts in Catalan and las cortes in Castilian is derived from the Latin cohors (cohort) and is used to refer to one of Barcelona’s districts. In the plural, the term also refers to judicial courts, which have been framed in the official discourse as synonymous with justice. Considering the Franco regime’s extrajudicial practices, the name Les Corts for the women’s prison is striking for its incongruity. Today El Corte Inglés has become synonymous with capitalist consumption boasting an imperial presence even beyond Spain as one of the biggest department store groups in Europe. By placing fragmentary snapshots of the prison that embodied the violent attempt to silence anti-fascist and anti-capitalist women’s voices alongside images of a department store that currently represents late-capitalism in postdictatorial Spain, Astudillo brings to visibility the multi-temporal character of sites and the continuum of ideologies that they house. When we look closely at the audiovisual material in the one-minute sequence that features the prison’s metamorphosis over time, we identify the filmmaker’s deliberate effort to recognize the massive repression that took place within the site’s walls. The framing of the sequence also indicates the desire to commemorate the Republican women and their children who were forced to endure it. Organized methodically, the sequence begins with a panoramic shot of the modern department store on a decidedly overcast day. The film then cuts to a close-up of the head of a female mannequin dressed in lingerie in the store window. After two additional shots of plastic female models on display behind glass, the film interjects the Francoist past with black and white still photographs of the inmates behind the walls at Les Corts Women’s Prison. Nuns sit at the center and also flank the prisoners. Then, three different archival stills show panoramic shots of the prison in the 1940s. The sequence galvanizes viewers to associate the repression and objectification of women then and now. The mannequin is lifeless and propped in a window for viewers to judge, desire, or disregard. If it were not for the rhythmic pulse of the soundtrack conjuring the mood of a rebellion or a

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haunting, we might be influenced to see Spanish women as victims entirely stripped of their personhood, but that is not the case. The low pitch cello combines with percussion sound shakers to produce a vibrant pattern that does not cast the images over which it is played as tragic or one-dimensional. The sound guides our emotions, occasioning us to view the story of injustice, confrontation, and empowerment in equal measure. Once again, the music is a crucial signifier of the filmmaker’s perspective and a central element in the audience’s emotional and intellectual viewing experience. This memorable sequence also poignantly dialogues with the other works in Unsettling Nostalgia. Chapter 1 explores how the novelist Roberto Brodsky uses the building for the UNCTAD as both a physical vestige of Chile’s recent past and a mirror in which the narrator sees his own reflection and unfulfilled dreams. Chapter 2 analyzes how Carmen Castillo’s documentary Calle Santa Fe also explores the filters of memory through which we view (and feel) public and personal spaces. She seeks to reclaim the safe house where her partner, Miguel Enriquez, was gunned down and in the process transmits a powerful message about the generative use of the past in the present. Through narrative and cinematic strategies, Brodsky, Castillo, and Astudillo respond to the effacement of sites and the whitewashing of dictatorial histories. To use Andreas Huyssen’s term, they frame edifices and communal areas in Spain and Chile as palimpsests that are never entirely erased (Huyssen 2003, 7). These authors and filmmakers vindicate the shrouded memories of those effaced spaces and remind the public of the cultural milieus that came before the Pinochet and Franco regimes, as well as the violent attempt to terminate them. RECEPTION, REACH, AND REDRESS As a small budget documentary produced as a master’s project in film, De monstruos y faldas has received limited attention. With English subtitles and open online access, it has the potential to reach an international viewership; however, Astudillo does not provide any explanatory titles or background information for viewers unfamiliar with the context. While that choice may contribute to artistic goals, it may also be viewed as a shortcoming. The film never introduces the speakers by name, which makes it extremely difficult to match the names with the faces and to connect the fragments of each account to the corresponding interviewee. On the one hand, that directorial decision conveys the idea that the stories of the daughters were collective and shared. On the other hand, that choice runs the risk of creating confusion. By not naming those who have chosen to bear witness, the film also jeopardizes the possibility to attribute agency to the survivors.

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In my estimation, what proves most valuable is the quality of creative insight that the film achieves. Its economy of language and unpredictable juxtapositions, accomplished through meticulous editing and research, requires viewers to decipher the film’s disruptive meaning. We are moved to consider the larger struggle for cultural survival and belonging within the context of patriarchal power and militarization in twentieth-century Spain. It is a struggle framed not in terms of a homogeneous collective reality, but rather as heterogeneous and contingent upon the construction of identities and the intersections of class, politics, and gender in their development. If militarism has violently transfigured institutions and lives, Astudillo’s film reveals that it has failed to extinguish the desire to return, rethink, reconnect and re-signify women’s stories of anti-fascist resistance. In this way, the nostalgia identified in De monstruos y faldas contrasts with the backwardlooking gaze usually associated with it. It is not a nostalgia that inherently transfigures history into a flat narrative, paralyzing the process of reflection. As Jameson suggests in ‘Walter Benjamin, or nostalgia,’ nostalgic longing can also be a source of inspiration to the extent that it embraces a historicizing perspective, one that situates the emergence of past collective identities in the historical situation that made that emergence possible. With De monstruos y faldas, Astudillo makes visible an unsettling form of nostalgia that brings together the desire to reconstruct bonds with an attempt to excavate the fractured and diverse nature of memories, as well as their thorny articulation in the present. The film offers new avenues to generate discussion not only on the gendered nature of Francoist violence but also on how the children of survivors and filmmakers consciously create memory narratives and oppositional identities by foregrounding strategies of resilience and bonding. NOTES 1. Carolina Astudillo directed and co-wrote the script with Gustavo Junqueira. Others involved in the production, animation, montage, editing, sound mixing, and music include, Milagros Herrera Cisneros, Catalina Calle Arango, Camera Ivan Piredda, Marco Arauco Tuesta, Martin Sappia, and Sven Vosseler. 2. I make this argument in another article titled “Torture, Masculinity, and Resistance in Chilean Documentary Film: Patricio Guzmán and Marcela Said,” forthcoming in the edited volume Gender and Violence in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas, eds. M.J. Gámez Fuentes, R. Maseda García, and B. Zecchi. Forthcoming, 2020. 3. See “Entrevista a Carolina Astudillo, directora de Ainhoa, yo no soy esa” by Mauro Lukasievicz in Revista Caligari, September 11, 2018.

Chapter Four

Postwar Prison Nostalgia La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón

Spanning the years 1939–1963, Dulce Chacón’s (1953–2003) testimonial inflected novel La voz dormida (2002) narrates the experiences of a group of communist women that were incarcerated in Madrid’s Ventas prison for their support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Among the political prisoners is Hortensia, a young communist militiawoman who will be executed shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Tensi. One of her primary concerns is to record her memories in a small blue journal that she will bequeath to Tensi. In it, Hortensia recounts the story of the executions, the inhumane sanitary conditions in the prison, the lack of food and clean water, the humiliation and mistreatment of the prisoners by the guards, and the loss of loved ones. But she also recounts the hope, solidarity, and political commitment shared among the prisoners. Hortensia, like the other characters in Chacón’s novel, is anxious about her past, for what is being silenced, forgotten, erased, and manipulated in a Spain monopolized by a hegemonic Francoist political narrative. Hortensia’s anxiety about such oppressive circumstances, however, registers certain concerns within the author’s own present. Based on the real oral testimonies of an ever-dwindling number of Republican women and men, the novel seeks to establish a counter-narrative that bears witness to the repression and violent deaths of socialists and communists in the first decades of the Franco dictatorship. In this chapter, I will explore the form and function of nostalgia in Chacón’s narrative and discuss how the novel has played a role in the larger movement to address the legacies of dictatorial violence; however, I will also argue that unlike the other works in this book, the author presents a reductive characterization of Republican women and a restorative nostalgic intertextual employment of 117

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texts and past motifs. While Chacón seeks to stir silenced voices, her gaze backward reinforces gender stereotypes and diminishes the highly contentious political landscape. POSTWAR RESTORATIVE NOSTALGIA The novel pays particular attention to the experiences of leftist urban working-class and lower-middle-class women whose loss was twofold. Through plotlines and characterizations, the author represents an authoritarian regime that, as Helen Graham points out, not only sought to achieve capitalist modernization to the advantage of the oligarchy but also sought to establish an “ultra-conservative construction of ‘ideal’ womanhood, perceived as the fundamental guarantor of social stability” (Graham 1995, 182). As Graham contends, after the war, the Franco regime punished groups of women that had challenged the established order culturally, politically, and economically. Throughout the dictatorship, archives containing the records of state retribution towards women were predominately under the custody of the police and the regime prohibited public dissemination of prison accounts. Since the death of Franco in 1975, historians have made some advances in the investigation and documentation of the wartime reprisals and Francoist repression; however, up until the mid-1980s, the experiences of imprisoned leftist women were overlooked in Spanish Civil War historiography and frequently neglected even by progressive historians (Herrmann 2003, 12). Even at the turn of the twenty-first century when memories of the Spanish Civil War and postwar became a central focus of an enormous body of cultural production, publications dedicated to women’s prison memories were still rare. In the 2008 essay titled “Mujeres en guerra: repensar la historia,” Mary Nash characterizes the ongoing subordinate position of women in the historical record of the Civil War by emphasizing their place in footnotes, appendixes, or single bibliographic references. (Nash 2008, 62). If we accept, then, that a disproportionate amount of attention has focused on men’s experiences of war and political persecution, we might begin to understand why some historians, survivors, filmmakers, and novelists, like Dulce Chacón, Carolina Astudillo, and Almudena Grandes, are anxious to explore women’s stories. One trailblazing figure who partly inspired the novel La voz dormida is Tomasa Cuevas (1917–2007), a former political prisoner from 1939-1945 who recognized the importance of women’s prison experiences decades before others. Amid the backdrop of the early transition to democracy, Cuevas gathered oral testimonies from her female prison companions. In 1985, Cuevas published Cárcel de Mujeres (1939–1945) to transmit a compelling record of Republican women’s accounts particularly during the years leading

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up to the civil war and in the aftermath. Cuevas’s pioneering collection of prison testimonies, along with a compilation of oral interviews conducted by Dulce Chacón (1954–2003), inform the novel La voz dormida. At the end of the book, Chacón expresses her gratitude to Cuevas, historians Fernanda Romeu Alfaro, Mary Nash, Paul Preston, and many former political prisoners who gave her their stories. The title of the novel suggests that Chacón seeks to awaken the “dormant” voices of the past. But, as many in the field of Memory Studies maintain, access to the past is more a question of the recreation of memories than the restoration of a lost and unchanging entity. In recording the history of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship, Chacón invokes competing discourses, one associated with the Franco regime and the other with the Second Republic. She looks to the past to champion the memory of Republican women and to uphold the political values related to the groups portrayed in the novel (solidarity, equality, pluralism, political and cultural freedom). In public statements before her untimely death in 2003, Chacón emphasized her admiration for the democratic-leftist ideals of the Second Republic, her affiliation with the contemporary incarnation of the Spanish communist party (Izquierda Unida), and her conviction that the transition to democracy failed to pave the way for an open dialogue about the contentious past. On the one hand, Chacón’s novel has played an important role in the politics of memory in the post-dictatorial present as it has exposed the vastly under-examined histories of political violence against women. To date, this is the predominant argument made about La voz dormida. On the other hand, it could be argued that Chacón renders largely monochromatic characters and seems to silence the dystopian consequences of the war, namely the profound political and social dissonance among the defeated. In La guerra persistente (2006) Antonio Gómez López Quiñones emphasizes the utopian current in the shaping of heroic characterizations and plotlines in La voz dormida. 1 Focusing primarily on the male characters, López Quiñones contends that Chacón’s utopic interpretation of the war presents a paradox: the society of that time is not utopic in spite of the great evils brought by the war, but precisely thanks to them. (López Quiñones 2006, 197). His analysis prompts readers to question the implications of a portrayal that recollects the war and postwar nostalgically. Without collapsing difference, I find that López Quiñones signals a pattern that Sara Horowitz traces in the aforementioned article “Nostalgia and the Holocaust” (2010). Horowitz describes the thematic shifts that she finds when comparing memoirs written by Holocaust survivors with those written by their adult children, commonly referred to as the postmemory generation. As I previously stated, Horowitz contends that “Conventionally, nostalgic remembrances gesture toward representations of a golden era (home), followed by catastrophe (separation from or destruction of that home).” That

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pattern, she observes, has significantly changed in texts written by a second generation born after the Holocaust. The home and its destruction collapse into one temporal object of nostalgia (Horowitz 2010, 56). “The Holocaust is constructed as a time when—whether by choice or by coercion—all Jews were one people. This vision of lost unity is posed against, and also offered as an antidote to, the perceived fragmentation” of the Jewish community (Horowitz 2010, 51). While the first generation of survivors longs for the richness and diversity of Jewish life before the Holocaust, the second generation often mourns the loss of the world that they were born into- “a place already stripped of Jewish community, already marked by death and atrocity” (Horowitz 2010, 42). Citing a range of works, Horowitz asserts, “It is not that the horror of the Holocaust is absent in these representations. Rather, the horror sits incongruously beside these gestures of nostalgia” (Horowitz 2010, 56). Horowitz’s study is useful in my understanding of some Spanish cultural production written by a second generation of authors that were born after the Spanish Civil War. Born in 1954, Dulce Chacón came of age two decades after the Civil War. Authors like Chacón experienced directly “el segundo franquismo” (1959–1975), or the second phase of the dictatorship, characterized by a sustained public campaign to normalize the criminalization of the remaining leftist opposition and to depict them as “anti-Spanish.” For over four decades, generations of Spaniards reached adulthood through an educational system that sought to solidify hegemonic narratives of gender, class, and nation. It is precisely that narrative that Chacón sets out to dismantle in her novel. In addition to Dulce Chacón and Almudena Grandes, whose work I examine in this book, I would also cite Manuel Rivas (b. 1957) as a leading figure in this cohort of authors. In El lápiz del carpintero, published originally in Galician as O lapis do carpinteiro (1998), the author details the violent, rat-infested and disease-inducing conditions of a prison site after Galicia had fallen to Francoist forces. As I explain in the article “Return to Galicia: Nostalgia, Nation and Gender in Manuel Rivas’s Spain,” Rivas explores the hierarchies of power that fueled incarceration and violence in the early 1940s, but he also projects an idealized image of a community-oriented environment where male prisoners of many political stripes show a deep sense of humanity towards one another (DiGiovanni 2017, 22). Rivas is one of a number of authors whose reflections of defeat and destruction are bound up in positive evocations of Republican unity and belonging. What is unique about Chacón’s La voz dormida is its focus on the experience of women political prisoners. The importance of Chacón’s move to bring women prisoners from the footnote to the page cannot be overstated. The novel depicts an early postwar period in which the regime brutally punished groups of women that had challenged the established order. But Chacón’s descriptions of the destruction of Republican communities, the

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misogynistic reprisals against women who challenged traditional gender norms, and the physical and emotional exhaustion of political prisoners, are all interwoven into a poignant narrative of Republican women’s resilience, creativity, and bonding. If the prison becomes the site of roots and belonging, then the perplexing notion of postwar prison nostalgia must be addressed. For sympathizers of the Second Republic, the yearning for the pre-dictatorial Republican past seems unsurprising. More remarkable and in need of analysis is the nostalgic element in contemporary representations of the period of dictatorial rule. In Chacón’s novel, the discourse of home and roots is situated within the unlikely site of the Ventas women’s prison in the early 1940s. Chacón performs two seemingly incompatible tasks: the author depicts a dystopic period to inform readers about nationalist politics of exclusion, misogyny, and violence. At the same time, her narrative imbues memories of subjugation and suffering with nostalgic memories of solidarity and the development of collective consciousness. That is also the case of Carmen Castillo, Carolina Astudillo, and Almudena Grandes, all studied in this book, but their narratives contrast with Chacón’s to the extent that they render visible the coexistence of courage, ambiguity, vulnerability, and contradiction. In doing so, Castillo, Astudillo, and Grandes shed new light on the atrocities of the regimes and the messy moral dilemmas that they produced, which were at the same time gendered. By contrast, La voz dormida champions the memory of Republican women in a categorical way, suggesting that the horrors of prison life unequivocally offered the female prisoners an opportunity to overcome all adversity and loss through companionship and a shared vision of social justice. By recasting a traumatic past into something meaningful, uplifting, and affirming, she glosses over a spectrum of ignored experiences still in need of illumination. Although it may sound surprising, I am suggesting that the novel illustrates what Boym theorizes as “restorative nostalgia.” According to Boym, “Restorative nostalgia puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up memory gaps. Reflective nostalgia dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance” (Boym 2001, 41). Typically, restorative nostalgia characterizes nationalist revivals, traditional values and reactionary political discourses. Since Chacón’s novel conveys a critique of the gendered and right-wing Catholic discourses that shaped the military regime’s ideology, “restorative nostalgia” seems like an unsuitable term to describe the author’s nostalgic depiction. But it is also true that through the content and the form, Chacón proposes to unearth the silenced and heroic past, restoring it intact and mending memory gaps. Boym argues that restorative nostalgics “do not think of themselves as nostalgic; they believe that their project is about truth” (Boym 2001, 41). This type of nostalgia tends to suppress the digressive, incomplete, and fractured nature of

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memories of atrocities and their difficult and subjective narration in the present. In the attempt to recreate for the reader an unmediated representation of women's postwar experiences, Chacón renders invisible the complex process through which fragmented memories about political and cultural repression are pieced together and narrated. The absence of nuance in the novel underpins a narrowly construed interpretation of the past and the process of memory. This chapter problematizes the overtly idealizing form of nostalgia that permeates Chacón’s novel, yet it does not dismiss the work as a mere retreat into the past. If the author’s glowing emotionally-charged gaze backward reduces the highly complex political landscape, it also accomplishes the important task of compelling readers from multiple generations to think about women’s wartime roles. Chacón’s novel must be situated within a cultural landscape that had previously lacked women’s perspectives of the war and postwar. La voz dormida became a bestseller in Spain and was later translated into numerous languages and adapted to the screen. It galvanized a wide readership, stimulating readers to explore new avenues for historical understanding and prompting long overdue questions about the intersections between revolutionary politics, gender, and class. The subsequent increase in forums and publications dedicated to the topic, along with widespread reference to the book, substantiate these claims. For many, the novel has become a point of reference in a broader attempt to reclaim an identity in opposition to the Francoist ideal. It forms part of the imaginary of many intellectuals, activists, writers, filmmakers, social workers and citizens involved in the movement for the recovery of historical memory, which was put into law in 2006 during the government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. As I stated in the introduction, the Law of Historical Memory was passed after a highly contentious vote and gave formal recognition to the regime’s victims, prohibited political events at the Valley of the Fallen, authorized the removal of Francoist symbols from public buildings and finally sanctioned state funding of the identification and exhumation of victims of Francoist repression. Since the conservative Popular Party has obstructed the implementation of the law, debates surrounding its limitations continue today. This brief account serves to contextualize Chacón’s novel and to point to the role that it has played in the current memory debates. It would be shortsighted to dismiss La voz dormida; however, this chapter seeks to complicate it, exploring the ways in which it reveals and conceals the complex memories of women’s involvement in the anti-Franco resistance. In what follows, I will examine the restorative nostalgic representation of the Ventas women’s prison community, analyzing key passages that depict solidarity and bonding between women born from war and postwar experiences. I will focus on several characters; Hortensia (the iconic miliciana),

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Elvira (the young guerrillera), and the prison guards. I will pay particular attention to Hortensia’s execution story, which alludes to the real death story of the Trece Rosas (a group of thirteen young women of the Unified Socialist Youth who were executed by a Francoist firing squad in 1939). An analysis of these characterizations, plotlines, and settings shows that in nostalgic longing, the yearned-for past is “depicted as the source of natural unity, order and authenticity” (Horowitz 2010, 49). Echoing Horowitz, “The moral absolutes amid the horror promise to restore a lost existential clarity to the generations that come after” (Horowitz 2010, 51). By representing the past through a restorative nostalgic lens, Chacón commemorates the struggles of Republican women and brings their stories from the margins to the center, but she also curtails a more nuanced engagement with the roots, effects, and legacies of the regime’s egregious human rights abuses and the misogyny that shaped them. PRISON COMMUNITIES, COURAGE, AND CONNECTION La voz dormida is divided into three large sections, each composed of a series of mini-chapters, wherein a third-person narrator relates the characters’ war and postwar experiences. The leading female characters that reflect the author’s nostalgia for a revolutionary past include Elvira, Hortensia, Tomasa, and Reme. Elvira is a aixteen-year-old Valencian communist prisoner whose father and brother fought for the Second Republic. Hortensia is a Cordobés communist prisoner sentenced to death for her involvement with the guerrillas after the Republican defeat. Tomasa is a middle-aged communist prisoner (probably loosely based on the Catalán Tomasa Cuevas) whose family was murdered by the Nationalists during the war. Finally, Reme is a Murcian prisoner whose grandson died in the war, fighting for the Republic. Her only crime was to have displayed a Republican flag after the Nationalist takeover of her city. The lives of these imprisoned women and guerrilla fighters are intertwined with other victims of the regime that are not incarcerated but suffer pressure from state agents as a result of their familial relationships with prisoners. These characters include Pepita, Hortensia’s sister who operates as a messenger between the prisoners and the members of the guerrilla; Don Fernando Ortega, a communist sympathizer who becomes the Ventas prison doctor and an ally to the anti-Franco guerrilla; and Doña Celia, the owner of the boardinghouse where Pepita resides. The portrayal of these characters offers readers insight into the daily lives of Republican women and men in Madrid in the 1940s, exposing a catalog of arbitrary repression, hunger, poverty, and fear. Similar to El corazón helado, the narrator’s descriptions suggest that violence against Republicans and their families was not limited to prison and execution, but extended to the psychological humil-

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iation and economic exploitation of survivors who managed to avoid incarceration. The Ventas prison illustrated in the novel resembles the prisons described in numerous testimonies; chaotic, dilapidated, overcrowded, impoverished, filthy, and teeming with disease and parasites, including ringworm, typhus, fleas, lice, dysentery, pellagra, syphilis, and tuberculosis. Remarkably, this oppressive context offers the characters a space to deepen their friendships and strengthen their political and moral values such as self-sacrifice, generosity, and loyalty. The Ventas prison becomes a place of fellowship not only due to the challenges that the women shared within its walls but also as a result of the gatherings and tender exchanges that took place inside. Education, the cornerstone of the Second Republic, becomes a practice, a rite and a source of intellectual and emotional growth within an otherwise suffocating site. Reading and writing are skills that literate prisoners teach to those previously deprived of an education. That detail not only seeks to underscore the values of the Republic but also to show the vast social-economic inequalities in Spain that the Republic sought to change. Such celebratory imagery of the political prisoners and their relationships folds Republican Spain, the war and the postwar into one context reframed as a time for transformation through the process of conscientization and collective bonding. The prison is also a site where longing for the prewar past is enacted through a kind of nostalgia therapy. In one scene, Hortensia suffers a bout of dysentery but manages to use nostalgic memories of her husband as a way to look beyond her misery: “Ringworm, typhus, fleas, lice, dysentery: it’s scandalous.’ No, none of these interests Hortensia at that moment. . . . All she wants to remember is a kiss. A furtive kiss, the last she managed to snatch from Felipe in Cerro Umbría” (Chacón 2006, 87). 2 The author imagines how the experience of pain and humiliation may be transformed into an experience of meaningful endurance rather than alienation from desire. This detail suggests the function of nostalgic memory in the context of adversity, and also the importance of nurturing an emotional self in the process of individual and collective survival. The prison is a site of birth and growth, literally and symbolically, as Hortensia delivers Tensi into the world while Elvira gains an empowering critical consciousness that allows her to become a leading guerrilla fighter after an incredible prison escape. In one representative scene, Tomasa is punished by the prison guard, Mercedes, for cursing the squalid living conditions that the incarcerated women were forced to tolerate. Rather than respond in fear, all of the women raise their left fists in the air and sing “El Himno Comunista” (“The International”) in solidarity with Tomasa. This song not only evokes the sense of common purpose and idealism shared among the prisoners, but it is also a powerful act of defiance. The author urges readers to imagine how intersecting forms of gender, class, and political oppression were defied. The itali-

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cized song lyrics are punctuated by descriptions of the women singing in unison: The deafening truth is on the march. The three women go on singing softly, Tomasa joins in. We have to shatter the past. The other inmates take up their companions’ song. . . . Legion of slaves, arise for victory. Mercedes drops the hand she had risen to hit Tomasa again. Eyes blazing, she turns to face the group that has formed around Elvira’s bed. We must all stand together. Silence! In the final struggle.” (Chacón 2006, 25) 3

The emblematic hymn emphasizes the need to break with the past; “Del pasado hay que hacer añicos” (“We have to shatter the past”). But the women that sing the hymn express an attachment to the recent past and protest against its compulsory obsolescence required by the Franco regime. Vocalizing the lyrics in unison provides a way for the prisoners to counter the massive efforts made in the Francoist prisons to break not only the bodies of prisoners but also their minds. Together in a choral group, the women carve a space to collectively stress the need to acknowledge the past and to continue to believe in the possibility of creating a more just future. This act of remembrance and defiance seems to have therapeutic qualities because as they sing the anthem, both Elvira and Hortensia forget both their physical and emotional pain: “Elvira leads the singing, waving her arms wildly, her hands rousing the waves of this raging sea. She does not realize her knees have started to bleed again. For a brief moment, Hortensia forgets the pain in hers as she sings, looking down at her belly. (Chacón 2006, 25). 4 This prison scene exemplifies the sentimentality characteristic of nostalgia, experienced by both the characters and the author. The Ventas prisoners do not merely recollect “The International”; they adopt a wistful attitude towards the memories that the song evokes. The song brings them back to a time before the war was lost. The act of recalling the communist anthem becomes an act of dissent colored by nostalgia that fosters the kind of stability and sense of identity that the prisoners need to persevere and maintain their dignity in such degrading circumstances that are threatening to a coherent sense of self. According to sociologist Janelle Wilson: “Nostalgia, in its ability to facilitate continuity of identity, can help to provide a sanctuary of meaning—a place where one feels she knows herself; where identity has a safe harbor” (Wilson 2005, 10). Following Wilson, this scene suggests that the experience of nostalgia both grounds the prisoners and brings them together. In another scene, the narrator explicitly describes the relationship between yearning, hope, and meaning. It takes place after Hortensia is executed. Reme is released, and Elvira has escaped. Tomasa is left alone in prison, accompanied only by memories: “She said the three names in a low voice, allowing herself to be taken by nostalgia. Hortensia. Elvira. Reme.

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Today nostalgia had three names” (Chacón 2006, 194). 5 A longing for the pre-Francoist past and the subsequent prison experience of bonding become bound up with one another. Nostalgia grounds the Ventas prisoners and becomes a vehicle for reinforcing values and for fostering continuity of identity. In Reminiscing as a Process of Social Construction, J.A. Meacham emphasizes the community-building function of nostalgic reminiscences: “they reflect the remembering individual’s membership in and identification with significant social groups” and “they arouse similar feelings in others and incite them to cooperative action” (Meacham 1995, 44). Meacham’s discussion of nostalgia is relevant here because nostalgia for the Ventas prisoners is a mechanism for reinforcing values, for inspiring motivation, and for fostering continuity of identity. This prison scene seeks to convey a sense of camaraderie borne from the civil war experience and its aftermath rather than the fragmentation that such circumstances might have produced. Such a rendering begs asking how nostalgia might contribute to the overall meaning that the text constructs about the postwar. This rendering does not convey the sense of alienation rooted in the postwar, but rather the unshakable moral values and political convictions of the prisoners. This portrait is at odds with earlier testimonial, novelistic, and cinematic formulations such as Tomasa Cuevas’s Cárcel de mujeres (1985) and Julio Llamazares’s Luna de lobos (1985), among others, which depict the fragmentation of the anti-fascist left and other unromantic challenges that Republicans faced during the 1940s. While Chacón seeks to stir silenced voices, the novel arguably reduces women’s experiences and the multilayered trauma that the war and postwar produced. Readers are faced with an inherent contradiction; La voz dormida opens a space for dialogue about women’s diverse experiences of the postwar and the anti-Francoist resistance, while it simultaneously closes off an exploration into the ambiguities that might challenge a utopic vision of an ideal Republican sisterhood. Perhaps the best illustration of a hagiographic characterization is of Hortensia, the protagonist and the character that corresponds to the woman that we find in the emblematic photograph that adorns the cover. It is a photo of a young woman, wearing a military cap, dangling earrings, and the blue overalls known as the “mono azul.” There are several references to this photo in the novel, such as the time that Felipe (Hortensia’s husband) gazes at the image. The grainy black and white picture inspires Felipe’s nostalgic desire to return to the past, to a time when he and his wife were united and eager to become part of a revolution that had begun with the Second Republic. While his memories connote a pleasant moment in the past, the fact that he is removed from that time triggers a profound sense of loss and yearning. He spends hours peering “into the abyss of losing her” (Chacón 2006, 201) and tunnels his memory of her into the fractures of his own subjectivity. 6 Horten-

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sia is kept alive through nostalgic remembrance, inspired by the frozen photographic image. This picture, with its antique look and enchanting imagery of a spirited young revolutionary woman and child, also evokes a sense of nostalgia in the reader. According to Gina Herrmann, this photograph, “is part of the political public domain, a propaganda photo that tells a story of revolutionary bravery” (Herrmann 2003, 23). Writing in Voices of the Vanquished: Leftist Women in the Spanish Civil War Herrmann argues, “The woman is also holding a child, a significant gesture, proving that the iconographic portrayal of the woman/ mother/revolutionary corresponds to a certain emotive and readily tellable myth of female heroism” (Herrmann 2003, 23). This iconic portrayal of the miliciana was first molded for the public through paintings, photographs, and war posters that were aimed mostly at a male audience and were intended as a recruitment device. While the image broke with tradition by portraying women as active in the war effort, that iconic image did not necessarily mirror the complex reality of Republican milicianas during the civil war. As historian Brian Bunk argues, “Although many revolutionary groups professed the equality of men and women, in practice they exhibited little difference in their actual treatment of women within the movement” (Bunk 2007, 126). Certain moments in the novel scratch the surface of these complex questions, yet they are not fully explored. Hortensia, for instance, becomes a romanticized, if not stereotypical, figure whose anxieties and sorrows are never entirely represented in the novel. These representations substantiate sociologist Elizabeth Jelin’s claim that “Establishing a group of heroes requires obscuring the actions of others. Emphasizing certain characteristics and indicators of heroism involves silencing others, especially the errors and missteps by those who are defined as heroes and must appear ‘immaculate’ in that history” (Jelin 2003, 27). The author arguably fails to match the complexity of the real human figures that she attempts to depict. The organization of the Hortensia plot follows the traditional format of a Christian martyr narrative, including a brief biography framing Hortensia’s dedication to the revolutionary faith and signaling her virtuous actions. It concludes with an account of her sacrifices and suffering because of that devotion. In one flashback, the narrator illustrates the torture that the civil guards inflicted on Hortensia in order to acquire information about the clandestine guerilla: They took her in almost every day, convinced that sooner or later she would tell them her husband was the Black Jacket, convinced one day she would tell them where he was. One day Hortensia would grow tired of always going back and forth and living in fear. But she never grew tired. She did not break. . . . The only thing she was frightened of was losing her baby. Yes, Hortensia was brave (Chacón 2006, 12). 7

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This fragment details the barbarity of the Nationalist guards, and at the same time, it underscores the unflinching heroism of the revolutionary woman. Hortensia becomes a paragon of courage and altruism. She, perhaps more than any other character, incarnates the ideals for that which the novel demonstrates an overtly idealizing form of nostalgia. Her comments and behaviors give readers an image of an ethics and progressive politics that the author seeks to champion. Significantly, this character evokes the memory of the real “Trece Rosas,” a group of thirteen young women killed by a Francoist firing squad after the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War as part of a massive execution campaign. Documentation and testimonies that detail the death stories of the Trece Rosas coalesce in the novel with the invented death story of Hortensia. The Trece Rosas were part of the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU), the socialist youth movement created by the unification of the Socialist and Communist youth in 1936. After the fall of Madrid in 1939, José Peña Brea (the leader of the group) was arrested and detained. Under torture, Brea disclosed the names of his comrades, which led to the arrests of many JSU members. The Thirteen Roses were among them, later tortured and incarcerated in the Ventas prison. They were then falsely accused and sentenced to death in August 1939 for aiding a “military rebellion” and for assassinating Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Gabaldón and his daughter. As Tabea Alexa Linhard asserts in her book Fearless Women of the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the incongruities in the case suggest that the Trece Rosas had been, “targeted because of the youth, their gender, and their activism in the JSU” (Linhard 2005, 136–37). The Franco regime turned these women into scapegoats, and their brutal execution served to send a terrifying threat to any dissidents willing to challenge the system. But, as Linhard shows, their death stories also emerged in poems and testimonies that lionized the young socialist women. The name “rosas” becomes a gendered symbol of love, youth, beauty, and innocence. Particularly the red rose (often associated with Las Trece Rosas) symbolizes blood, sacrifice, courage, passion, and revolutionary leftist politics. According to Linhard, the themes that surround the death story of the Trece Rosas include: “(1) a sacrifice for a worthy cause, (2) the motifs of regeneration and transcendence that correspond to a heroic death, (3) an emphasis on the innocence of the executed minors, and (4) a radical condemnation of the brutality of the Francoist regime.” (Linhard 2005, 141–42). Chacón draws from these themes to render the death story of the fictional character Hortensia. The clear allusion to the Thirteen Roses is perhaps one of the most potent examples of how nostalgia is at play on both the intradiegetic and extradiegetic levels of the novel, “inside” and “outside” of the world described to the reader.

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The characters in La voz dormida remember and name the real Trece Rosas at a pivotal point in the plot; as they await Hortensia’s execution. While the Trece Rosas are not actors in the novel per se, they occupy a mythical space in the collective memory of the characters of the Ventas prison. Tomasa, for example, recalls the cheerful disposition of the Rosas during their incarceration at the Ventas prison: “Tomasa recalls Julia Conesa, bright as a button, Blanquita Brissac playing the harmonium in the chapel at Ventas, and Martin Barroso’s freckles” (Chacón 2006, 128–29). 8 Elvira joins Tomasa in her attempt to keep the memory of the Rosas alive as they await the execution of their prison sister. She remembers seeing them come out of the chapel in twos, without bowing their heads. She could still hear some of them, like Julia Conesa, singing. The author’s portrayal of the Trece Rosas explicitly echoes the testimonies in Fernanda Romeu Alfaro’s El silencio roto: Mujeres contra el Franquismo (1994). The issue at stake here is not whether Chacón’s version is based on real accounts, but rather the mythic quality of the images that surround the young martyrs. For Elvira and the other imprisoned women, the political struggle and deaths of the Trece Rosas were not in vain, but instead served as an inspiration for the anti-Francoist resistance. Nostalgia here functions as a life-giving force and the antidote to pessimism in the unbearable postwar prison setting. Particular objects associated with the Trece Rosas also produce nostalgic memories of the martyrs and thus take on particular significance. Among them is Joaquina’s belt from an unnamed African country, which was adorned with twenty-eight little black figurine heads that she distributed among her fellow prisoners the night before her execution. As Tomasa remembers her fallen companion, she caresses the small object; “In her pocket she caresses the little piece of black leather she has kept there since the night of 4 August 1939. It was the buckle from Joaquina’s belt” (Chacón 2006, 129). 9 The belt conjures a vivid image of Joaquina, one of the real Trece Rosas. For Tomasa, the figurine from her belt is not only a symbol of a heroine but also a relic that triggers her memory and offers her a means to feel close to her and cope with the execution of Hortensia. In her study of nostalgia, sociologist Janelle Wilson suggests, “Of course the objects themselves do not possess nostalgia; rather the individual imbues the objects with meaning such that nostalgia is evoked” (Wilson 2005, 110). The figurine is a symbol of identity and solidarity. As Sharon Macdonald posits in Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today, “The past is not only discussed and thought about, it is also materialized in bodies, things, buildings and places. It is felt, experienced and expressed through objects, such as ruined buildings, monuments . . . and practices, such as commemorative rituals, historical reenactment” (Macdonald 2013, 79). In the novel, readers see the relationship between sensory functions (particularly touch), the materiality of the object (the figurine) that triggers memories of significant

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others and shared experiences, and emotional responses. Each piece of the belt serves as a mnemonic tool that contributes to the continuity of the memory of Joaquina as well as the collective struggle and sacrifice of antiFrancoist women in general. Julia Conesa’s real farewell letter is another central mnemonic object that evokes an embodied nostalgic response in the fictional world of the postwar characters, and beyond that world, namely, the post-dictatorial context in which the story is written. Similar to the case of El corazón helado, this letter contains a certain sacred quality; it is an authentic document that tells a story of sacrifice and ends with a plea; “Que mi nombre no se borre de la historia” (Chacón 2002, 199) [“Don’t let my name be erased from history”; Chacón 2006, 134]. Elvira recalls Julia Conesa’s letter as she awaits Hortensia’s execution. The nostalgia that Elvira experiences as she remembers Conesa’s message, however, bespeaks the author’s own sense of loss and longing. In the acknowledgements, Chacón expresses her gratitude to Fernanda Romeu Alfaro who shared Conesa’s original letter with her. The meaning that the document acquires for the characters in the novel, as well as the author, demonstrates how artifacts foster an affective connection to the past. Significantly, the letter appears reproduced in its entirety in the novel. The message is followed by the words, “No, el nombre de Julia Conesa no se borrará en la historia” (Chacón 2002, 199) [”No, the name of Julia Conesa will not be erased from History”; Chacón 2006, 134]. The reproduction of this letter serves as a tribute to the memory of Conesa and an appeal to remember the struggles that anti-fascist women faced after the war. While these references to the Trece Rosas are explicit, there are also indirect references to the young communist martyrs. The testimonies about the execution of the Trece Rosas that Romeu Alfaro cites in El silencio roto: Mujeres contra el Franquismo (1994) correspond almost directly to Hortensia’s execution scene in the novel. As Linhard notes, in these testimonies, the execution of the Trece Rosas, “becomes an emblematic event in the history of women’s resistance to Francoism” (Linhard 2005, 143). Romeu Alfaro cites Antoñita García, who witnessed the last hours of the thirteen minors: “The minors in my unit that were shot were amazingly brave. The hours that they were in the chapel, they sang revolutionary songs and handed out personal things, and wrote letters” (Romeu Alfaro 1994, 40, my translation). 10 Romeu Alfaro also cites a document originally published by the French Communist Party in 1947. This document details the deaths of the thirteen martyrs: The young women, showing an admirable serenity, distributed their clothes. . . . They comforted the other inmates who were crying and said they were happy to give their lives for a just cause. When the Falangist executioners

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came, the thirteen minors went out shouting “Long live the Republic” (Romeu Alfaro 1994, 42, my translation). 11

This narrative bears a striking resemblance to the one describing Hortensia’s death. Like the thirteen youths, Hortensia’s death story does not reveal signs of fear, anger, regret, or anxiety on the day of her execution: “They say that in the first light of that morning, Hortensia stared straight at the firing squad, as they all did. Long live the Republic!” (Chacón 2006, 149). 12 Even more explicit is the description of Hortensia’s steadfast strength of character moments before her execution, which took place shortly after her daughter was born: They say the new guard went with her to the chapel and sat outside all night with the baby. And that the little girl couldn’t stop crying because she was so hungry, the poor thing. And the priest tried to convince her to confess and take communion. He told her his duty was to save her soul, and that if she made peace with God he would allow her to breastfeed her baby. But she would not confess or take communion: her convictions were more deep-rooted even than her deepest feelings (Chacón 2006, 148–49). 13

This passage shows the character’s steadfast resistance to the nexus between the Church and the State and their attempt to control women and their bodies. This characterization shows how nostalgia for a revolutionary epoch, and the imagined paragons of integrity that populated it, hinges upon the reconstruction of oppositional identities. The setting and characters that fill these locations become instrumental in a critique of the interrelated workings of religious fanaticism, sexism, and imperial notions of the state that legitimized acts of political and gendered violence. By identifying how Chacón cross-examines such “othering,” we attend to the multiple dimensions of memorial representation. But what this passage fails to reveal is the potential anxiety that such experiences produce. Hortensia’s unwavering refusal of the priest’s bargain suggests that her political consciousness and commitment remained unaltered even in her final moments. Through this gesture, the text proclaims in quasi-religious terms that Hortensia was wedded to her faith in communism and ready to sacrifice her life for the cause. She is at peace with her fate as a martyr. One of her final deeds is writing a farewell letter, in which she encourages her daughter to continue the struggle: “Fight daughter, and go on fighting as your mother is fighting, and as your father is fighting. It is our duty, even if we pay with our lives” (Chacón 2006, 247). 14 Her death is a violent and untimely tragedy, but at the same time, it is a meaningful act of political sacrifice. Tensi, who is adopted by her aunt Pepita, later cherishes the letters, the journals, and the blunt pencil that her mother leaves to her. These nostalgia-provoking gifts help to facilitate continuity of identity by keeping Tensi connected to her mother. The act of reading the journals is an

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act of bonding. She feels as if her mother is with her and that they are united through the written word. Hortensia’s journals become not only an heirloom but a tool to incite action against the oppression of silence under the regime. The image of the pencil evokes the epigraph by Cesar Vallejo preceding Hortensia’s execution: “If you see nobody, if you are afraid of the blunt pencils, if mother Spain falls—just a thought—off you go, children of the world, off you go to find her” (Chacón 2006, 151). 15 Chacón and Vallejo long to guide us back to a time and a place of authenticity and solidarity. The pencil is an object of nostalgic return, symbolizing the expression of Republican ideals. A blunt pencil, however, is one that struggles to perform its duty as it has been silenced. The pencil that Hortensia leaves behind for Tensi is worn because she wrote feverishly what she could not say aloud. The pencil remains unsharpened because the owner was silenced, but the pencil, in the hands of young Tensi, represents the continuation of the struggle. The author’s nostalgia manifests itself in characterizations and symbols (the belt, the pencil). At its core, the pencil is a life-giving tool. Eventually, Tensi joins the Communist Party and carries her mother’s convictions into the future. The Hortensia plot consciously attempts to turn a tragic story of execution into a narrative of hope and the survival of ideals. Chacón effectively dramatizes Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller’s claim that the longing to return combines with “a need to redress an injustice, one often inflicted upon an entire group of people caused by displacement or dispossession, the loss of home and of family autonomy, the conditions of expulsion, colonization, and migration” (Hirsh and Miller 2011, 7). The novel is guided by the belief that testimonies can be used to rectify the distortions of the Francoist hegemonic story and that remembrance is not an unavailing retreat into the past, but a valuable means to gain cultural and political identity. Tensi’s political commitment represents a successful transgenerational transmission of memory because she accepts her mother’s past and finds it useful in the present. While she does have direct memories of the war, Tensi possesses what Hirsch, considers “postmemory,” a concept that I alluded to in the introduction. In Family Frames (1997) Hirsch contends, “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events” (Hirsch 1997, 22). Hortensia’s letters and journals provide Tensi with a postmemory of the war and hence give her a foundation and a sense of purpose. It is precisely this kind of transgenerational transmission that the novel seeks to engender. In other words, the novel attempts to achieve in the present “real” world what the letter produces in the fictional world. La voz dormida is the medium through which the author attempts to bring Republican testimonies of the Francoist past into the public sphere and to convey a link in the present to a Republican

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identity and tradition once repressed under the dictatorship and disregarded in the post-dictatorial period. On the one hand, the framing of these overlapping death stories could be read as a type of “radical nostalgia” to borrow a term from Peter Glazer, who examines the commemorative gatherings and performances among the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. In his book Radical Nostalgia (2005), Glazer makes a case for the progressive potential of nostalgia, arguing, “The veterans’ commemorative performances create a historically and emotionally resonant space, in opposition to the mainstream culture at large, where their radical politics may be celebrated. In this context, the veterans and their supporters can look to the past for what they lack in the present, seize it, and perhaps carry it forward” (Glazer 2005, 37). For Glazer, radical nostalgia is creative because it refuses to remain trapped in a melancholic reification of the past. Drawing from Glazer’s insights, one could argue that Chacón establishes a counter-narrative that bears witness to the women’s violent deaths, and in doing so, creates an emotionally resonant space in opposition to Francoism. The insertion of these death stories in the novel could be read as a vehicle that might carry these memories forward to defend a particular identity and politics in the present at variance with the Francoist past. But there is a more critical way to read the Trece Rosas intertext in La voz dormida: the narrative recovers the repressed Republican stories behind the Francoist nostalgic mythification by means of further nostalgic leftist mythification. In State Repression and the Labors of Memory Elizabeth Jelin argues, “Simplified Manichean schemes without “gray areas” or fissures are more easily transmitted than interpretations that are more polysemous and that allow for multiple meanings and interpretations” (Jelin 2003, 98). The myth that Chacón conceptualizes celebrates the civil war as a meaningful battle that sought to stem the tide of fascism that had engulfed Spain. This discursive re-inscription constitutes an example of the purpose of myth if, as Labanyi contends, myth gives the impression of objectivity while it rejects ambiguity and the possibility of alternatives, creating a stable—simplified— world of essential and unchanging values. “Myth is concerned with the eternal and the universal, and attempts to neutralize change; history is concerned with the temporal and the particular, and stresses the importance of change” (Labanyi 1989, 33). From this critical perspective, the novel constitutes an easily communicated narrative about the postwar that diminishes the plurality of experiences of Republican women and frames their deaths using templates of martyrdom. If Hortensia represents the ideal example of an ethical subjectivity, then Elvira symbolizes her younger counterpart. At sixteen, she is sent to the Ventas prison, and it is there where she learns commitment, solidarity, and strength through the exemplary models of Hortensia, Reme, and Tomasa. Elvira soon escapes the prison and joins her brother in the Cerro Umbría—

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the rugged hills that concealed the armed resistance groups. The conditions are harsh, but she shows exceptional courage. The narrator notes that while Felipe (one of the members of the guerrilla and Hortensia’s widower) does not approve of women taking part in combat, he soon accepts Elvira because of her bravery and knowledge of weapons: By now she could use them all, but she preferred her own little pistol, which she carried stuck to her belt. Besides she had political training, and was far better instructed than most of the guerrilla fighters in their band. She had learnt all she knew about politics in Ventas goal. And in the field classes she taught the men who couldn’t read or write. She was intelligent too, and at sixteen knew a lot more than many who die of old age. And she was tough. In less than a month, she had got over the fever that always came on in the evenings. . . . She took deep breaths of the mountain air, carried her haversack and rifle like all the others, and never complained on their record marches. She didn’t fall over once when they had to walk backwards through the snow to put any pursuers off their trail. (Chacón 2006, 178) 16

The focus on Elvira’s strength and ability to use weapons reveals the author's attempt to portray a revolutionary woman who directly opposed old patterns and conservative gender roles. The author recognizes that such norms persisted on the political Left despite the gains of the Republic. In her confrontations with other guerrilla fighters, Elvira assertively points out their obstinacy for not embracing the true equality for which the Party could strive. When Felipe (aka Mateo) insists that the Party could only function with the dominance of men, she rebuffs his patriarchal thinking: “You didn’t learn a thing from the Republic, Mateo, men aren’t our lords and masters anymore“ (Chacón 2006, 179). 17 This critique of sexism and ideological contradiction is one important instance of attenuation of an otherwise flawless characterization of the Republican side. Notwithstanding, the Elvira plot mostly maintains assumptions surrounding gender and sexuality in the context of the war and after. By becoming involved in the guerrilla, Elvira takes a combative role that previously had been solely the domain of men, thereby directly challenging the male role as resilient, astute, and self-reliant. However, despite her role as a combatant, Elvira’s actions and appearance conform to traditional gender stereotypes. The depiction of Elvira’s beauty, femininity, and innocence reinforces gender roles throughout the novel and particularly when she is in the guerrilla. Although Elvira carried weapons and knew how to operate them, she preferred the dainty one, and there is never mention that she actually used them during any fighting. That detail indicates a desire to counteract the unsettling image of a masculinized woman. Eventually, she becomes a leader in the anti-Franco resistance in exile and gains status as she is considered “as much a man as her brother” (Chacón 2006, 195). Elvira’s story attempts to

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tell readers about the psychology of women in the clandestine guerrilla movement, how they viewed themselves, and how they viewed each other. However, the author does not expose the deeper anxieties that involvement in armed conflict might produce for both men and women. Instead, what we have is a larger-than-life heroine based on binary gender stereotypes and heteronormative expectations. Elvira embodies an unproblematized conception of leftist ideals and values for which the author demonstrates a restorative nostalgia. NOSTALGIA AS A TOOL Perhaps what makes this restorative nostalgic reconstruction most problematic is what it tends to silence. This streamlined narrative evacuates the vexing and messy questions produced by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, the morally ambiguous situations that the postwar created, and the unromantic aftermath in its wake. It is also significant that negative characterizations of militarized female prison guards function as a counterpoint to the idealized characterizations and plotlines of the Republican prisoners. Contrasting with the portrait of prisoners, Chacón describes the prison guard named Mercedes in binary terms of good and evil. She is described as a lizard who will soon learn the evil ways of the other prison guards “La Veneno” (“Miss Poison”) and “La Zapatones” (“Big Boots”). The text refers to the Nationalists in animalistic terms, which is ironically reminiscent of the Francoist discourse. As Paul Preston suggests, the regime’s left-wing adversaries were always portrayed as subhuman, filthy, depraved, and criminal; “This language justified the need for ‘purification,’ a euphemism for the most sweeping physical, economic and psychological repression” (Preston 2006, 305). After the war, the regime established an investigation called the “Causa General,” with the aim to gather evidence of Republican criminality. As noted by Helen Graham, “The main message of the Causa General was that the atrocities had been committed only by Republicans and endured only by Franco supporters” (Graham 2005, 133). Such historical context problematizes Chacón’s language, which seems to project a dualistic image that ultimately runs the risk replacing one monologic discourse with another. Returning to Horowitz, “Such ways of recollecting are nostalgic in positing in the historical past values and qualities longed for in the present, such as pride in one’s heritage and moral certainty” (Horowitz 2010, 46). The golden hue of nostalgia in La voz dormida mostly disallows for the breakthrough of uncomfortable dissonant recollections of the harshest postwar realities and their gendered underpinnings. The author’s selection of stories may be interpreted as an evasion of uncomfortable zones of memory, a conscious or subconscious effort to steer clear of any narrative derailment of

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the mythical portrait of the survivors. Since Chacón lacks direct memories of the war and early postwar, her narrative may also be interpreted as a vehicle for the communication of the selective memories of the survivors that she either read or heard. From either perspective, Chacón recounts heroic episodes of women’s resistance that deeply move readers, but also constrain the boundaries of our understanding of postwar state violence against women. By analyzing Chacón’s novel alongside others in this book, we gain a deeper understanding of nostalgia’s multiple forms and how they shape representations of women’s experiences of war and repression. This study allows us to consider what might be lost and what might be gained through an idealizing lens of restorative nostalgia. While my analysis has conveyed concerns about what Chacón’s nostalgia conceals or reduces, it has also attempted to emphasize the novel's significance. La voz dormida invites readers to move beyond gender-blind interpretations of the past by focusing on women. In doing so, it complicates masculinist narratives of the anti-Franco resistance that center entirely on men. In its vindication of women’s voices, the novel not only illuminates how gender has shaped political repression and resilience, but also how gender shapes nostalgia itself. The narrative provides readers an opportunity to think about the intersections between nostalgic longing and the construction of identity. An analysis of Chacón’s book also offers readers insight into nostalgia’s multiple functions. As an affective form of memory, nostalgia mitigates traumatic experiences and thus works as a coping mechanism in the context of adversity. It is a vehicle for reinforcing values, for inspiring motivation, and for fostering the development of knowledge. The novel serves to invite reflection upon the junctions between the emotional and the nostalgic and how these might contribute to new forms of knowledge. Literature communicates emotional ways of remembering, allowing readers to consider how we come to understand and feel about the past. Finally, Chacón’s nostalgic depiction of female characters shows the galvanizing potential of this form of nostalgia as the novel has inspired authors and activists across generations, many of whom have introduced readers to the subtleties of historical developments and their entrenched classist and sexist foundations. As I indicated earlier, La voz dormida may be considered a forerunner of numerous works dedicated to the representation of women’s struggles in the war and postwar. In the decade following the publication of La voz dormida, Almudena Grandes published El corazón helado (2007) and El lector de Julio Verne (2012), two novels that I examine in the following chapter. With a keen awareness of complexity and contradiction, Grandes builds on the foundation established by Chacón and foregrounds the multilayered struggles of marginalized Republican women thereby vindicating a cultural continuity while expanding our grasp of a profoundly complex historical moment and its numerous legacies in the present.

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NOTES 1. López Quiñones dedicates one chapter of his book La guerra persistente (2006) to the concept of utopia in contemporary Spanish narrative. See the chapter “La utopía retrospectiva: La Segunda República o la nostalgia por un pasado mejor.” 2. ”Tiña, tifus piojos, chinches, disentería, esto es una indecencia. No, no le interesa a Hortensia en este momento. . . . Ella sólo quiere recordar un beso. Un beso furtivo, el último que le arrancó a Felipe en Cerro Umbría” (Chacón 2002, 133). 3. ”Atruena la razón en marcha. El trío continúa cantando a medio tono. Tomasa se suma al himno. Del pasado hay que hacer añicos. Las demás internas de la galería corean a sus compañeras. . . . Legión esclava, en pie, a vencer. Mercedes retira la amenaza, deja caer la mano cernía sobre el rostro de Tomasa y con furor se gira hacia el grupo que se ha formado alrededor del petate de Elvira. Agrupémonos todos. ¡Silencio! En la lucha final (Chacón 2002, 45–47). 4. ”Elvira dirige el canto con los brazos sin poder controlar la emoción, alzando con sus manos el oleaje de un mar puesto en pie, sin advertir que le sangran de nuevo las rodillas. Y Hortensia olvida por un momento el dolor de las suyas y canta mirándose el vientre” (Chacón 2002, 46). 5. Pronunció tres nombres en voz baja, para dejarse llevar por la añoranza. Hortensia. Elvira. Reme. Porque la añoranza hoy tiene tres nombres” (Chacón 2002, 284) 6. Teaching Chacón’s novel first at Indiana State University and later at Keene State College was helpful in the development of this chapter. I thank the students of my honors course “Revolution and War in Spain,” notably Jewel Bean whose insightful comments in class inspired this notion of “tunneling” memory. 7. “Casi a diario se la llevaban, creyendo que un día les iba a decir que su marido estaba con El Chaqueta Negra, creyendo que un día les iba a decir dónde estaba. Un día, Hortensia se iba a cansar de tanto ir y venir con el miedo a cuestas. Pero no se cansó. Ella soportó lo suyo. . . . Sólo temió perder al hijo que esperaba. Hortensia era valiente” (Chacón 2002, 26). 8. “Y Tomasa recuerda a Julita Conesa, alegre como un cascabel, a Blanquita Brissac tocando el armonio en la capilla de Ventas, y las pecas de Martina Barroso” (Chacón 2002, 192). 9. “Y acaricia en su bolsillo la cabecita negra que guarda desde la noche del cuarto de agosto de mil novecientos treinta y nueve. Pertenecía al cinturón de Joaquina” (Chacón 2002, 192). 10. “Las menores de mi expediente que fusilaron fueron maravillosamente valientes. Las horas que estuvieron en “capilla” cantaron canciones revolucionarias y repartieron cosas personales, escribieron cartas” (Romeu Alfaro 1994, 40). 11. “Las jóvenes, dando pruebas de una serenidad admirable, distribuyeron sus ropas. . . . Consolaron a las otras reclusas que lloraban y aseguraron que se sentían felices de dar su vida por una causa justa. Cuando los verdugos falangistas vinieron, las 13 jóvenes menores salieron gritando “Viva la República” (Romeu Alfaro 1994, 42). 12. “Cuentan que aquella madrugada, Hortensia miró de frente al piquete, como todos. ‘¡Viva la República!’” (Chacón 2002, 220). 13. “Dicen que la nueva la acompañó a la capilla y se quedó fuera con la hija toda la noche. Y que la niña no paró de berrear de hambre, criatura. Y que el cura la quiso convencer para que confesara y comulgara. Le dijo que su deber era salvarle el alma, y que si se ponía en orden con Dios le dejaba que le diera la teta a la niña. Pero ni confesó ni comulgó, no consintió, esa mujer tenía los principios más hondos que el propio corazón” (Chacón 2002, 219). 14. “Lucha, hija mía, lucha siempre, como lucha tu madre, como lucha tu padre, que es nuestro deber, aunque nos cueste la vida” (Chacón 2002, 357). 15. “Si no veis a nadie, si os asustan los lápices sin punta, si la madre España cae—digo, es un decir—salid, niños del mundo, id a buscarla” (Chacón 2002, 225). 16. “Podría manejar cualquiera, aunque ella prefería su pistolita, una pequeña pistola que llevaba al cinto. Además tenía formación política, mucho más avanzada que la mayoría de los guerrilleros de la partida. En la cárcel había aprendido todo lo que sabía de política. Y en la escuela de campaña daba clases a los hombres que no sabían leer ni escribir. Era lista, a los

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dieciséis sabía más que muchos que mueren viejos. Y era fuerte. No había tardado ni un mes en curarse de la fiebre que le subía por las tardes. . . . Respiraba el aire del monte con ansia y aunque parecía una mosca, cargaba con el macuto y el fusil y no se quejaba nunca en las marchas. Ni siquiera tropezó una sola vez cuando debían caminar de espaldas en la nieve para despistar con las huellas“ (Chacón 2002, 261). 17. “No has aprendido nada de la República, Mateo, los tiempos de los señoritos se acabaron” (Chacón 2002, 263).

Chapter Five

Nostalgia and Inner Exile in Almudena Grandes’s Spain

Nostalgia and exile are experiences that are often considered together since exile involves the expulsion from one’s homeland, and nostalgia often arises from homesickness. As the introduction to Unsettling Nostalgia suggests, Spanish and Chilean authors forced into exile wrote a remarkable number of novels and memoirs about the divides produced by the military coups and the longing that physical separation causes. In the essay “The Exile’s Dilemma: Writing the Civil War From Elsewhere,” Sebastiaan Faber explains, “For intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, writing became a way to deal with their multiple loss—losing the war, losing friends and family, but also losing a sense of identity and purpose in life” (Faber 2007, 342). But it is also true that thousands of dissidents never left Spain and experienced an internal exile, enduring disconnection and loss within their own homelands. In his 1980 study Literature and Inner Exile: Authoritarian Spain 1939–1975, Paul Ilie defined inner exile as an isolating psychological state more than a geographic one (Ilie 1980, 2). For Ilie, “inner exile is an emptiness that awaits restoration, much the same way that territorial exile is the absence that compensates itself by nostalgia and hopeful anticipation” (Ilie 1980, 14). The writings of predominantly male intellectuals (Marsé, Goytisolo, Benet) offer Ilie a window to define the features of inner exile, which involve political disenfranchisement, physical and economic hardship, and the mental suffering produced by the identification with values in conflict with the prevailing ones. In the article “Passivity and Immobility: Patterns of Inner Exile in Postwar Spanish Novels Written by Women,” Phyllis Zatlin expands the concept by examining representations of nonconformist adolescent women within a traditional, male-dominated society. By tracing patterns of alienated young 139

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protagonists in Spanish postwar novels written by authors including Carmen Laforet (1921–2004), Ana María Matute (1925–2014) and Carmen Martín Gaite (1925–2000), Zatlin persuasively argues that these writers construct a heroine who is a self-conscious inner exile. These 1940s female figures have “a clear sense of being excluded from the relative freedom of masculine culture, but also of being alienated socially and politically” (Zatlin 1988, 3). In other words, for women, inner exile had multiple dimensions emerging from the intersections of identity and marked by historical processes through which their bodies became sites for male dominance and control. Zatlin’s gendered approach to the theme of inner exile, and her argument that these authors present a powerful message of political protest serves as a point of entry for an analysis of a generation of women writers in Spain that came after the war generation. This chapter moves beyond previous conceptualizations of inner exile by examining how a nostalgic lens tints the postwar experience of political and gendered alienation in recent post-dictatorial literature by women of a younger generation. Whereas early postwar novelists like Matute and Laforet mostly conveyed a dismal vision of the here-and-now, many contemporary authors project a nostalgic image of postwar resistance. In this analysis, I will focus on the writer Almudena Grandes (b. 1960) who did not experience the Spanish Civil War firsthand, nor did she live through the most violent Franco years as an adult woman like her predecessors. Nevertheless, Grandes, similar to Dulce Chacón (1954–2003) and Carolina Astudillo (b. 1975), grew up within a culture dominated by a dictatorial narrative that perpetuated the marginalization and suffering of leftist women. Over two decades after the death of Franco, at a time when many authors began to produce counternarratives through fiction and film, Chacón, Grandes, and Astudillo entered the memory debate with an attentiveness to the concrete challenges facing women who had supported the Second Republic and who were forced to live within the transformed landscape of the Franco Regime. If we juxtapose the novels of Laforet, Matute, and Gaite with the stories of Grandes and Chacón, we might trace a generational difference and conclude that temporal distance plays an overwhelming role in the development of nostalgic perspectives. As Zatlin argues, typically the protagonist in these earlier novels is “orphaned and treated as an outcast by her relatives; she resents the privileges of her male cousins; she is a solitary individual, ill at ease with almost everyone” (3). In contrast with these arguably anti-nostalgic authors, Grandes and Chacón create assertive female characters whose strength increases within communities of women where friendship is forged in the context of adversity. That said, viewed alongside Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida, Grandes’s novels offer a comparatively fuller portrait of the postwar as they depict the multiple traumas stemming from militaristic culture and shed new light on the role of gender hierarchies in the making of

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dictatorial violence. In this way, Grandes finds a striking counterpart in the Chilean filmmakers Carmen Castillo and Carolina Astudillo, whose films delve deep into the complexities of longing for resistance. In what follows, I will offer a close reading of the novels El corazón helado (2007) and El lector de Julio Verne (2012) to address the particular ways in which an unsettling form of nostalgia is structured and functions in these texts set in the context of inner exile. This comparative study of different contemporary nostalgias addresses questions concerning the variation of form and the effects of that contrast. By reframing the history of postwar suffering, Grandes gives rise to a new way of interpreting the past that extends the concept of exile and sharpens our awareness of the regime’s social categories and structural injustice. Through the voice of the narrators, the author also envisions the promise of an emergent community that might incorporate the legacies of resistance in the present. Nostalgia thus becomes a valuable tool to reclaim a history of resistance while bringing out its profound complexities. ALMUDENA GRANDES AND THE WEB OF NOSTALGIC MEMORY I want to begin with an examination of the Almudena Grandes website (http:/ /www.almudenagrandes.com) since it visually conveys the unsettling nostalgia that underpins the author’s most recent novels: El corazón helado, Inés y la alegría, El lector de Julio Verne, Las tres bodas de Manolita and Los pacientes del Doctor García. The last four titles listed here constitute the volumes in an ongoing series of historical novels tied together formally as Episodios de una guerra interminable (Episodes of a Never-ending War)—a title evocative of the Episodios Nacionales by Benito Perez Galdós. Building on the legacy of the nineteenth-century author, Grandes traces the bridges between the Spanish Civil War, the Franco period and the neoliberal present. The virtual venue for the marketing of the novels offers an audiovisual metaphor of the author’s understanding of return. The website underscores the tensions between past and present, joining new technology with the old, combining era-specific photographs, historiographies, and maps with recent interviews and book trailers. Through this computer-generated maze, the author elicits a reflection on the context of division, persecution, and multiple forms of exile, including one that takes place outside one’s homeland and the other within it. If the website interviews related to El lector de Julio Verne deliver relevant information that contextualizes the author’s research process, then the display of photographs associated with El corazón helado and the corresponding sound effects, which simulate a 1950s-style Kodak Carousel slide

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projector, render visible the author’s vision of memory. The ten images follow a chronological sequence, beginning with a picture of war-torn Spain, followed by one shot evoking diaspora, then framing the focal point of the author’s work—Spain under Franco. The slideshow finally ends with a colorized image of the transition, featuring several generations of Spaniards. The sound of the carousel that overlays this visual material dramatically shapes how we see and understand the images. The click evokes memories of home and family entertainment—a social experience that has become virtually obsolete. First patented in the mid-1960s, the Kodak Company nostalgically named the projector “carousel” to give consumers the alluring idea that they could journey back in time and through the memories of their youth. But the loss and longing evoked by this montage cannot be reduced to mere sentimentality. Significantly, the focusing lens oscillates between sharp and blurred images, many of which are damaged. Faces are blotched out or faded, inviting viewers to reflect upon the passage of time and on the limitations of the archive. These photos are not unfiltered records of history; they selectively spotlight subjects and landscapes, they reveal imperfections and absences; and finally, they change over time. The presentation of these photos opens a window to the author’s conception of the nature of memory. To use Jo Labanyi’s terms, memory is framed as “the afterlife of the past in the present” (Labanyi 2007, 193). The author thus positions herself as a memorialist that uses the archive along with the imagination to narrate the elusive past and catalyze new thinking about it. The unsettling nostalgic perspective that the author conveys through the image of the Kodak Carousel on her website is heightened by the subtext that appears at the foot of each photo. Written in old courier style font, the subtext draws viewers into a reflection on childhood, trauma, and trans-generational communication of memory: There are stories that our parents and grandparents never wanted to tell us. Some because they were so heroic they knew we could not accept their outcome, and others because they were so terrible we could never forgive them; stories that seem unbelievable, but ultimately have been true; stories that would freeze one’s heart. 1

Recalling the well-known Antonio Machado poem LIII in Proverbios y cantares (1912) (Campos de Castilla), Grandes magnifies Spain’s splintered political history and prompts viewers to think critically about the emotional challenges of remembrance and return. I begin with the Almudena Grandes website because it conveys a longing to reclaim an identity in direct opposition to National-Catholic ideology. Authors like Grandes reshape otherwise disheartening stories of dictatorial repression into compelling narratives of resistance that serve as a source of inspiration and a model for cultural and

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political renewal. Understood in this way, the 1930s becomes a site of roots and potential connection. Readers witness the suffering produced by Francoist forces, but a sense of community shapes the oppressed groups that populate that past. It is significant that the author’s image of the past contrasts sharply with her vision of the present. As I underscored in the introduction to this book, nostalgia often conveys more about the disenchantment with the here-andnow than it does about yesteryear. In 2008, Grandes published a dialogue with Gaspar Llamazares—the former leader of the leftist coalition la Izquierda Unida. In the exchange, both Grandes and Llamazares vindicate the values of the Second Republic against what they view as Spain’s current cultural ethos of consumerism, apathy, and individualism. Their reflections on detachment and reconnection with Spain’s Republican history coalesce with a denouncement of governmental policies involving the privatization of healthcare and education. They point to the persistence of economic exploitation and claim that its continued existence needs principled resistance from the left just as it did in the 1930s. Grandes calls for a day of observance to mark the proclamation of the Second Republic—April 14, 1931. In doing so, she voices the need for continuity with the revolutionary projects of the 1930s. Reading these statements alongside her work, we can extract illuminating perspectives on the relationship between historical thought, nostalgic representation, and the shaping of modern Spanish political collectivities. UNFREEZING AND UNSETTLING HEARTS Spanning a full century from 1900–2005, El corazón helado (2007) is an epic novel that traces the interconnected stories of two families, one associated with the Franco regime and the other with the Second Republic. The narrative takes readers from a first-person account set in the post-dictatorial present to a third person account set during the Spanish Civil War and postwar. These temporal shifts and multiple voices allow the author to construct a highly nuanced portrait of the political roots that engendered the Spanish Civil War generation, as well as their progeny. These narrative strategies also serve to bring out the winding and equivocal nature of memory as the characters and the reader discover past events in unchronological order. Sarah Leggott sums it up as “a narrative technique that subverts any notion that recuperating the past is a straightforward endeavor, highlighting, rather the complexities inherent in the process” (Leggott 2015, 113). As I see it, the exposure of memory’s mechanisms and the meditation on omissions, dissonance, and yearning are part and parcel of an unsettling form of nostalgia that I have defined throughout this book.

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The sites and contexts in which nostalgia for the Second Republic are experienced are both within the 1940s exilic communities in France in the immediate postwar, as well as in the 2005 “point of telling.” In exile, nostalgia emerges as republican families form social networks and nourish their political ideologies. The first-person narrator, named Álvaro Carrión Otero, also experiences nostalgia in 2005 as he pieces together his own genealogy and discovers the hidden revolutionary politics of his paternal grandmother and the conservative forces that imprisoned her and prematurely ended her struggle. The novel takes readers on the protagonist’s quest to gain critical consciousness through an engagement with memory. He discovers his link to both the feminist efforts of the Second Republic (symbolized by his paternal grandmother), as well as the misogynist and classist oppression unleashed by the hijacking of the Republic and sanctioned by the Franco regime (expressed by his father). Throughout the novel, the protagonist increasingly identifies with his forward-thinking lineage that was subjugated in patriarchy, while he distances himself from his National-Catholic roots. Crucial in this process is also the figure of Raquel, who leads Álvaro to the painful recognition of his family’s responsibility for egregious injustices, including the theft of Republican lands. By ultimately positioning these two main characters as self-identified with the Second Republic, Grandes portrays complex negotiations with the past that result in the construction of an identity at odds with the Francoist hegemonic story and its lingering social and economic structures in the present. As one of the most ambitious contemporary novels of memory, El corazón helado requires two intersecting genealogical trees of families marked by bonds and fractures. It charts ideological battles complicated by various forms of exile and by intergenerational differences between Civil War survivors born before the Second Republic and their children born during the dictatorship. My discussion in the first half of this chapter highlights how El corazón helado adopts an unsettling nostalgic lens to explore a range of often ignored aspects of women’s lives during twentieth-century Spain. These include the asymmetrical relations that have governed family life, the empowering experience of education, the misogynist backlash against women’s political mobilization and sexual liberation, and the economic and gendered systems of domination that have shaped prostitution. The novel emphasizes the centrality of gender and sexuality in debates about Spanish identity and modernization during the Second Republic and the ongoing role of gender in the aftermath of the war and military rule. Similar to La voz dormida, El corazón helado conveys a nostalgic vindication of leftist middle and working-class women whose loss was manifold; but unlike Chacón, Grandes spotlights the fraught negotiation of gender roles in the context of twentieth-century Spain and the limitations, contradictions, and anxieties that women faced as they challenged patriarchy.

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This novel, comprising over nine hundred pages, offers a wealth of opportunities to explore the experience, representation, and gendered underpinnings of nostalgia. Exploring all of them would exceed the reach of this chapter; therefore, I will have to limit my scope and leave other areas open for future analysis. I will concentrate on the story of the narrator’s paternal grandmother, Teresa González Puerto, who serves a vital role in the author’s critique of National Catholic patriarchal power. In this analysis, I will also focus on a small, but interrelated, plotline that involves a non-heteronormative couple whose story forms part of the narrator’s search for understanding. I contend that Grandes takes up one of the most understudied questions facing memory studies in Spain today as she traces the bonds between groups whose resistance to hegemonic gender and sexual norms joins them together. Viewed in tandem, these nostalgically rendered characters bring into focus the connected histories of subjugation within the context of Franco’s Spain and their legacies in the present. Almudena Grandes begins El corazón helado with an epigraph by María Teresa León (1903–1988) who spent decades in exile in France (1939–1940), Argentina (1940–1964) and Italy (1964–1977). “For thirty years we have longed for a paradise. . . . We are the exiles of Spain. . . . Leave us our ruins. We must begin again from the ruins. We will get there” (León, Memoria a la melancolía, 1970). By citing León, Grandes implores readers to consider how nostalgia has shaped a generation of exiled Republican women severed from their homeland. The “paradise” for which León longs is not only a place but an ethos of commitment to revolutionary ideology. “Leave us our ruins,” León states to describe an attachment to a historically specific past and progressive political community torn asunder by war and distorted by the regime’s consolidators. She summons her fellow exiles and emphasizes the role of memorial return in the ongoing process of identity construction: “We must begin again from the ruins. We will get there.” As Gina Herrmann notes, León’s memoir “reflects on the process by which political beliefs and commitments become imbricated in the process of identity formation” (Herrmann 2010, xii). By beginning El corazón helado with León, Grandes lays the foundations for what becomes an act of bonding with the progressive women that came before her. From different generational standpoints, Grandes narrates the interwoven relationship between the emotional, the historical, the political, and the cultural, and also how these interpolate the present. The novel opens at a funeral on the outskirts of Madrid—a place of mourning—where the main character named Álvaro (b. 1965) remembers his enigmatic father, Julio Carrión, who was born in 1922 and came of age during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Through that plotline, the author initiates a reflection on concealment, recovery, and identity. As the presentday protagonist rummages through his father’s belongings in the wake of the

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funeral, he discovers a locked box holding a collection of documents and photos that serve as clues that ultimately reveal the origins of his family’s massive accumulation of wealth. Álvaro tracks down a web of characters, discovering an entire related Republican family tree that he never knew existed. He finds a damning story of Nationalist profiteering from the large properties owned by vanquished Republicans who were forced into exile. The youngest of Republican kin, Raquel Fernández Perea (b. 1969), becomes Álvaro’s link to a political history with whom he longs to identify and somehow make amends. The seemingly irrepressible romance between these distant cousins represents a symbolic homecoming, one that brings out the politicized nature of home as well as its complexities and contradictions. The end dramatizes the second generation’s realization of the corrupt environment of their origins and the plight that they face after gaining such knowledge. Piecing together fragments of stories and historical records, Álvaro realizes the multifaceted and contradictory nature of history and its actors. The discovery of his father’s membership in the Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (JSU) and his military record in the Blue Division raises serious questions about his father's identity. Álvaro comes to realize that his limited knowledge of the war is a result of his failure to care enough to inquire. Readers, by contrast, gain access to his father’s perspective through a thirdperson narrator situated in the past. In alternating chapters, readers learn that Julio is a chameleonic figure, wavering between political bands depending on their position of power. His motivation is consistently wealth and power. It is a desire to ascend above the rural lower-middle-class status to which he was born in the small town of Torrelodones (near Madrid). In 1937, at the age of fifteen, he moves to Madrid and later works as a mechanic, making meager wages. The author emphasizes his economic and sexual ambition, inseparable and of equal importance. He views the control over women as a true demonstration of masculinity. The garage separates him from the world of elegant streets, opulent shop windows, beautiful women and money (Grandes 2010, 141). The author captures the effects of a hierarchical capitalist and patriarchal framework by portraying a man uninterested in overturning power structures, but rather in navigating and scaling them. Grandes describes the trap in which this character finds himself as a form of “destierro” (Grandes 2007, 167) or “exile” (Grandes 2010, 141). The sense of alienation emerges not only from the experience of physical banishment but also from the experience of competition and dehumanization associated with the forces of capitalism. The answer for Julio is not resistance, but acquiescence. By 1939, he sides with the fascists for their imminent victory, as well as for their contempt for class and gender equality. In the aftermath of the war, this character fights with the Blue Division, a unit of approximately eighteen thousand Spanish fascist volunteers that served the Nazi Army on the Eastern

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Front of World War II from 1941–1944 and were defeated. In that war context, Julio engages in a range of misogynist acts, including the exploitation of Polish women prisoners. Through this character, the author builds a complex portrait of economic opportunism and its gendered underpinnings. He spends two and a half years in France (1944–1947) speculating an allied victory and subsequent overthrow of the Franco regime at which point he would conveniently turn coats once again and return with the Spanish Republican exiles. In France, Julio befriends the Fernández family, a group of exiled Republicans whose wealth becomes the object of his desire. He soon devises an elaborate scheme to claim and sell their properties in Spain by manipulating an already corrupt political and economic system that benefitted the Francoist victors. In the words of Lorraine Ryan, “Julio is representative of an inequitable configuration of power, affluence, and masculine respect that originates in the unjust postwar redistribution of Republican property and wealth, sanctioned by laws such as the 1939 Ley de Responsabilidades Politícas [Law of Political Responsibilities], which ratified the illegal expropriation of Republican property” (Ryan 2017, 84). To add to this economic exploitation, Julio perpetrates an arguably more devastating ploy involving sexual exploitation, which is a plotline that allows the author to comment on the intersections of identity and power. Through guise and deceit, he becomes determined to conquer this Republican family’s daughter, Paloma Fernández, known as the “Red Widow.” After gaining her trust, she becomes sexually involved with him, breaking her abstinence since the death of her husband in the Civil War. He then betrays the entire Fernández family, leaving them landless and in despair. As excluded Republican exiles, they are left with no legal recourse for retribution. Upon her realization of Julio’s multi-layered deception, this leading female figure becomes suicidal. The author’s representation of the effects of misogyny in the context of the Franco regime is further nuanced through a depiction of Julio’s relationships with a range of other women. In this way, Grandes unromantically depicts messy relationships and the challenges that Republican women faced during the 1940s. The author takes up the unsettling theme of prostitution through a character named Mari Carmen, and in doing so, explores the gendered nature of the economic and political consequences of the war. She is a former militant of the Socialist Youth (JSU) who avoids postwar imprisonment but becomes robbed of her revolutionary self, unemployed, and precariously surviving to support her child while her husband serves his sentence as a political prisoner. Mari Carmen’s humiliation is only reinforced when she reencounters Julio Carrion, who had unsuccessfully pursued her during the Second Republic. When Julio sees her undernourished body on the streets of Madrid, he also sees an opportunity for exploitation. The intimacy that she had previous-

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ly denied him could now be bought. Her body becomes another conquered land. Like the city of Madrid, she had been “beaten into submission” (Grandes 2010, 454). That caged city without victors, only masters, was also “a paradise for imposters, usurers, and opportunists. A place where he might thrive” (Grandes 2010, 454). With the wealth that he had gained from the theft of Republican lands, Julio propositions Mari Carmen with a wad of banknotes (Grandes 2010, 478), which she reluctantly accepts. This scene unsettles readers with the ugly choices produced by the postwar exploitation of republican women. It also advances a broader critique of capitalist opportunism, as well as the contradictions of the Francoist discourse that upheld Catholic virtues, but allowed for the structural inequalities and misogynist behavior that maintained the workings of prostitution. Viewed alongside La voz dormida, Grandes’s narrative is not only more complex but arguably more critical of the Franco regime to the extent that it underscores the intersections of gendered, political, and economic violence and its unromantic impacts. The Paloma and Mari Carmen plotlines unmask the process by which acts of women’s subjugation have fed off patriarchal myths about domination over a woman as being the true manifestation of manliness. These characters’ bodies come to signify territories to be conquered through sexual aggression, which at the same time served the greater political goal of expanding hegemonic patriarchal power. The novel suggests that such acts solidified the myth of male superiority and dominance, which not only helped silence republican women at the time but all women, even those supporting the conservative ideology of the regime (DiGiovanni 2012a). The subjugation of conservative women and the measure of consent that it implies is outlined in the story of Álvaro’s maternal grandmother (Mariana) and his mother (Angélica), who married Julio Carrión in 1956. Born at the turn of the century, Mariana came of age during the 1920s in a divided family: her father (Lucas Fernández) was a conservative monarchist while her uncle (Mateo Fernández) was a progressive republican. This split marks a foundational moment and the emergence of two intersecting family trees representing the Nationalist and Republican sides. During the war, Mariana disdains her Republican kin as they threaten her class privilege. Fast-forward to the postwar when Julio Carrión discovers the wealth of the Republican Fernández family in France. He manipulates them into giving him power of attorney to work as an agent for them. To facilitate the seizure of their lands, he deceives the remaining members of the Fernández family (Mariana and Angélica) who had been occupying the properties. In 1949, Julio takes possession of all assets, marginalizing Mariana and Angélica until the latter, at age fourteen, seduces him and works her way back as a beneficiary of the remaining wealth of the Fernández family.

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This character willfully becomes a tool in the consolidation of Julio’s power and comes to represent female complicity in the restoration of masculinist hegemonic power. She is not portrayed as a mere victim as she embraces nationalist ideology for the class privilege that it affords her. However, it is evident that she and her mother also suffer from unequal power relations as wives and mothers subordinate to male authority. Through this depiction, Grandes speaks to the larger Francoist context of patriarchal control that diminished the power of all women, even those in favor of the regime. By including complex stories of Nationalist women, Grandes prompts us to consider the intersectional nature of women’s experiences and how they have shaped the story of present-day Spain. These intertwining tales seek to expose the broader systematic expropriation of lands and female bodies by the supporters of the National Catholic Regime who remained to pillage and plunder and who have evaded accountability for their crimes to this day. This fictional tale points to the crossroads of class and gender hierarchies during Franco’s Spain and connects them to a reflection in the present through the voice of Álvaro. As he digs through his deceased father’s possessions, he recalls frequent demonstrations of power, particularly in relation to women. During his childhood in the 1970s, his father would “rate” dancers on TV on a scale from one to ten. Álvaro remembers that his father particularly despised women politicians. Sexism and classism intersect to show the value system of a man upholding patriarchal authoritarianism beyond the dictatorship. The process of remembrance is therefore shot through with a critique of ongoing misogynist attitudes and practices in the present. The author’s attention to the usurpation of power by the National Catholic apparatus and its sweeping impact on Leftist women cannot be overstated. The novel also brings out the disenchantment produced by the discovery of such cultural, political, and economic theft. As Álvaro sifts through his father’s belongings, he feels “a sudden cold surge inside, a moral nausea and a temptation to flee” (Grandes 2007, 300; English 2010, 258). The nationalist past is framed as empty and void of inspiration. Where, then, might we find the nostalgia in this narrative? Nostalgia, in fact, begins with disenchantment—a repudiation of past and present injustices—and is sustained by a yearning for guiding models. Grandes uses the unheroic nationalist past as a crucial point of comparison to bring out the moral and political high ground of the Second Republic. Since a comprehensive analysis of each nostalgic representation would exceed the scope of this chapter, I will focus only on the author’s interpretation of women’s resistance to facilitate a comparison with La voz dormida and Calle Santa Fe. Of greatest concern is when and where the author expresses nostalgic longing, what that longing signifies, and how that longing is conveyed. In the previously mentioned locked box, the present-day protag-

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onist (Álvaro) discovers letters written by his paternal grandmother, Teresa González Puerto (b. 1900), that give voice to a lineage that her son (Julio) had effectively erased. It is in the representation of this character and in the backdrop against which she is depicted that readers witness a literary manifestation of longing for resistance. The setting of this plotline begins in the 1930s and ends a decade later in the early postwar years. Through this character, the author captures an image of an empowered and mobilized woman of the Socialist Youth (JSU) working alongside other forward-thinking women and men against patriarchal and class oppression. The nuanced treatment of the role of sexuality in the development of political awakening is what makes the account of Teresa González Puerto so remarkable. Readers observe how societal pressure and gender norms had shaped Teresa’s early decisions, namely her marriage at age twenty-one to Julio’s father Benigno (twenty years her senior). Before the Republic, Teresa is described as resigned to her life, living in an unloving marriage acting out the motions of traditional womanhood. It is within the context of the Second Republic that she is emboldened to become a public speaker, shedding her former self. “That woman had vanished, had been shed like a useless skin to reveal the lithe, tireless body of a young woman with the face of a girl. . . . It was as though Teresa González had been reborn not only on the inside but on the outside” (Grandes 2010, 151). 2 If this is a portrait of a youthful feminized subject, it is not a naïve and infantilized one. This character makes a point of denouncing male condescendence rooted even in the world of revolutionary politics. Her struggle against injustice seems somewhat solitary in the rural Sierra de Guadarrama until she meets Manuel Castro, a progressive teacher from a neighboring town who is evacuated in 1936 at the breakout of the war. The growth of Teresa’s intellectual and intimate relationship with Manuel becomes a scandalous deviation from normative sexual ethics. With this story, the author makes apparent the link between women’s sexual agency and political agency—the private and the public. Identity formation, sexuality, and consciousness constitute intersecting processes developing in tandem. The author points to the connection between women’s sexual agency and political agency throughout the novel. A foundational moment in Julio’s life makes that link explicit. The scene takes place after he accidentally witnesses a moment of sexual intimacy between his mother and Manuel Castro. Julio becomes destabilized and resolves to reject them both, convincing himself that they had abandoned him. In early June 1937, he attempts to assert male authority over his mother as a response. The misogyny in Julio’s reproach signals his identification with his father. Days after this breaking point, Teresa escapes to Madrid with Manuel. Julio would later find a letter and never see his mother again. This plotline transmits an image of how the expansion of women’s agency was met with misogyny. Teresa’s husband (Benigno)

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attempts to obstruct her new-found power through violence, as well as the indoctrination of their son. This character renders visible the anxiety produced by the shifts in gender norms and the process by which progressive women became defined as “other” and therefore demonized in patriarchal culture. Echoing vocal fascists like Ernesto Gímenez Caballero, this character (Benigno) goes on to thank the military rebels for purifying the city: “they have to raze it to the ground, bring it to its knees, so that it can rise again, pure and clean” (Grandes 2010, 156). 3 This character frames the city as female, a detail that not only bespeaks the influence of the broader misogynist political discourse wielded by the Nationalist forces but also indicates the sources of Julio’s gendered conception of power over places and women. It is unsurprising that a nostalgia for the “past” as opposed to the degenerate present becomes the axis of Benigno’s discourse. The past becomes synonymous with the “golden age” and modernity with the “Fall, which is inevitably bound up with the sin of Eve—the undoing of humankind due to the lust of a woman (DiGiovanni 2012a). The author’s characterization of Benigno and Julio hinges upon an insightful critique of militarized masculinity and internal colonization, as well as the misogynistic rhetoric in their making. If the author uses these characters to spell out the gendered angst driving the military backlash against the Second Republic, she uses Teresa to dramatize the unstable sense of place that many women experienced in the context of the gender revolution of the 1930s. On the one hand, Teresa stands defiant in the face of masculinist power, yet she also becomes guilt-stricken by societal pressures and assumptions regarding reproductive and maternal responsibilities. The following passage attenuates the glow of nostalgia by complicating women’s attitudes about their own participation in radical politics: In her heart, Teresa González felt guilty, and though she knew inside and out the lecture about the harmful vestiges of reactionary Catholic orthodoxy, how they infiltrated a woman’s subconscious and had to be rooted out at all costs, she felt much more comfortable when she was not at home (Grandes 2010, 153). 4

The author’s nostalgic depiction of the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War is inextricably linked to a more extensive inquiry into the harmful effects of patriarchy and the internalized gender norms that kept women in passive roles. Grandes not only shows the sense of instability that this moment of social upheaval produced for men like Benigno but also—in a different way—for women and their children. When Teresa begins to speak in 1933 on behalf of Republican Socialist women, her son experiences mixed emotions, including immense pride and fear. “Julio had never felt so important, so proud of his mother. Nor had he ever felt so close to the abyss, when

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he realized that things were coming to their inevitable conclusion” (Grandes 2010, 154). 5 At stake was the gendered order, synonymous with male privilege. Later Teresa is imprisoned by Francoist forces for her political involvement and ultimately dies in 1941 of infection in a penal colony in Ocaña. Her son (Julio), ends up identifying with his father’s defense of patriarchy and forever rejects his mother and her memory. By extension, he denounces the entire Republican side and allies himself with the regime to amass his own economic and sexual power. As I explained in chapter 2, Chilean women of the revolutionary Left have also conveyed the unsettling gendered conflicts related to political activism. Similar to Almudena Grandes, Carmen Castillo captures the agonizing negotiations that women have made between motherhood and political commitments and how such negotiations remain unresolved today. Castillo’s film documents the mixed feelings of the now-adult children, some of whom remain silent about the absence of their mothers, and others who blame their mothers for having abandoned them for the revolution. Calle Santa Fe becomes a channel to reveal social expectations and political limitations that have contributed to binary understandings of “good” and “bad” motherhood. Viewed alongside El corazón helado, we observe a shared need to engage the paradoxes and obstacles that, as Michael Lazzara writes, “have impeded an honest writing of the history of militancy” (Lazzara 2016, 455). Remarkably, these narratives also capture the voices of children who come to empathize, understand, and identify with their mothers’ stories. For both Castillo and Grandes, remembrance of histories of struggle has the potential to be useful in the construction of political identities and a sense of belonging. In El corazón helado, the memory of the leading leftist female figure is excavated over six decades later. Álvaro reconstructs what would have otherwise been a forgotten story. The author shows the unfolding of historical discovery and questioning by interlacing Alvaro’s thoughts in 2005 with the words written (in italics) by Teresa in a letter to her son, Julio. This letter, hidden away for decades, constitutes a trigger for nostalgia and the literary device that links the past and present, provoking a sea change for the protagonist. The author places the voice of a Republican woman in her quest for liberation alongside the thoughts of her grandson, who was told a false story by his father. Julio’s wholesale rejection of his mother’s newly developed sense of empowerment had become the driving force behind his erasure of her memory, as well as his disdain for all women. This story dramatizes Michael Lazzara’s contention that “projects of domination are not just about quelling dissent or destroying bodies, but also about eradicating the very memory of dissent” (Lazzara 2016, 448). The need to connect with the Republican past and its feminist dreams thus becomes the protagonist’s central motivation. Álvaro reads his grandmother’s letter aloud, speaking her words and finding connection despite her physical absence: “you can’t know how

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proud I am to be your grandson. . . . Teresa, I have always admired people like you. And I know it has come too late, I know it is a pyrrhic victory, that it cannot make up for defeat, but you have won the war now, Grandma” (Grandes 2010, 262). 6 As Álvaro reaches out to his dead grandmother, he sympathizes with Republican women more broadly and denounces the marginalization and suffering produced by the Nationalist insurrectionists and the patriarchal structures that informed their violence. At the same time, Álvaro becomes inspired by her story and longs for her guidance. Championing the symbolic presence of her progressive convictions, he incorporates them into his own identity. A photograph of her combines with the letter and becomes a powerful mnemonic tool that inspires an unsettling nostalgia: “Her picture sent a sudden wave of love surging through me, as deep as it was ambiguous, since it related to everything I had gained and everything I had lost in losing my father. I had gained a grandmother, and found a rare fierce happiness” (Grandes 2010, 329). 7 Whereas the rejection of the father denotes a break with the patriarchal oppression upheld by the Franco regime, the establishment of a bond with the grandmother marks a longing to rekindle the feminist emancipatory potentials of the Second Republic for the future. If Franco’s discourse conveyed a restorative nostalgia for the stability of the patriarchal family as a reaction to the gender revolution of the Republican 1930s, then Grandes subverts that discourse by vindicating a maternal lineage founded in Republican dreams of gender and class equality. The family comes to represent both a site of rupture and a wellspring of inspiration. By framing Alvaro’s awakening as inextricably linked to memories of women’s multilayered struggles, the author illustrates the interplay between nostalgic remembrance and critical consciousness. Another way in which readers gain insight into the interplay between nostalgic remembrance and critical consciousness is through a subplot involving queer experiences and identities in rural Spain. With this thread, the author traces affinities between marginalized groups and underscores the transformative power of discovery through a nostalgic journey. The story builds as Álvaro returns to the small town of Torrelodones not only to track down documentation of his grandmother’s life and death but also to talk to those who remembered her. There he meets Encarnita, born around 1925, now in her eighties. In what becomes an unforgettable conversation, Encarnita invites Álvaro to imagine her own ultra-conservative upbringing and her father’s disapproval of Teresa’s newfound sexual and political freedom. Encarnita remarks that her mother, on the other hand, greatly admired Teresa. Women’s emancipation produced a visceral reaction from those defending patriarchy. In Encarnita's words, her father could not swallow such changes for they made him sick.

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This subplot has clear nostalgic underpinnings. As Encarnita reminisces about how a touch of Teresa’s insubordinate character had “rubbed off” on her, Álvaro muses, “The ghost of Teresa González hovered over us like a good fairy, a gentle, munificent presence” (Grandes 2010, 339). 8 Teresa represents the rebellious spirit and the value of compassion with which the character identifies the Second Republic. Encarnita details the cruel circumstances of Teresa’s untimely death and conveys anecdotes that allow Álvaro to imagine the extent of her fight. What is then revealed is an eye-opening joint struggle among women for sexual agency in patriarchal heteronormative culture. After Encarnita leaves the room, her daughter tells Álvaro that her biological mother, named Amada, had always loved Encarnita, but moved to Madrid fearful of judgment for transgressing norms. There, she explains, Amada briefly had a sexual relationship with a man as an attempt to pass as heterosexual. After conceiving a child out of wedlock, Amada returned to Torrelodones to live with Encarnita. They later went on to share fifty years together, raising a family. The two women, whose names notably signify “embodied” and “loved” lived out an unspoken intimacy. This narrative of an unarticulated fifty-year-long romance between women transmits the deep sense of alienation sustained by heteropatriarchy that has vilified the non-heteronormative couples. Simultaneously, it becomes a poignant fairytale of enduring love. We should recall that Álvaro muses that “the ghost of Teresa González hovered over” “like a good fairy” tangentially forming part of this love story that defied Francoist doctrine in various ways. Sexuality might have been a domain of patriarchal control in Franco’s Spain, but women nevertheless created ways of living out intimacy and emotional bonding. After reading this passage, Encarnita’s earlier comments (conveyed to Álvaro) become much more transparent. ‘Your grandmother didn’t hide herself away, she wasn’t ashamed, quite the opposite, she looked radiant, it did your heart good to see her, because she was convinced that she had every right to do what she was doing. That’s how she was, and I have to say, I think she was right, I envy her because I . . .’ She stopped suddenly, as though she’d bitten her tongue, and shot me a look of panic that I didn’t know how to interpret (Grandes 2010, 341). 9

If within patriarchal heteronormative logic “good” women have been framed as naturally passive, faithful, subordinate to men and committed to sexual abnegation, then both queer and radical leftist heterosexual women have been judged as deviant. Such shared struggles are evident to Encarnita and Amada’s daughter. As she brings her discussion of her mothers’ love story to an end, she recognizes affinities between alienated groups. Her remarks also indicate that the silence surrounding acts of resistance does not signify inexistence of them, but rather their invisibility. Álvaro thanks her for her story and thinks once again, “I felt the gentle, benevolent presence of my grand-

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mother still hovering over me” (Grandes 2010, 349). As if to speak directly to Teresa, he says, There was something heroic and yet familiar, something small yet exemplary, something larger than life yet real, something Spanish yet universal about Teresa Gonzalez Puerto, and all of those qualities converged on a single point. Me. I would have fallen in love with you, Grandmother. Had I been your age, had I known you in 1936, had I not been your grandson (Grandes 2010, 349). 10

This heroic narrative leading to a single identity constitutes an origin story, but it is a selective one, that is self-consciously singled out among other competing stories by the workings of nostalgia. Álvaro’s choice to reject any affiliation with his grandfather Benigno bespeaks a disavowal of Nationalist ideology and its patriarchal principles. In the essay “Queering Roots, Queering Diaspora,” Jarod Hayes maintains that roots narratives often rely on a patrilineal family tree structured by heterosexual marriage and reproduction (Hayes 2011, 73). The Encarnita/Amada/Teresa plot complicates that prescription with a portrayal of a chosen matrilineal kinship that honors a diversity of practices and identifications. The “home” that Grandes constructs foregrounds and defies the double marginalization of non-heterosexual women. Readers encounter what Hirsch and Miller call “the political dimensions of the private and familial” (Hirsch and Miller 2011, 8). The private romance between Encarnita and Amada and their friendship with Teresa brings clarity to Álvaro’s understanding of the political stakes of the Spanish Civil War. To be sure, the social reforms of the Second Republic were insufficient and riddled with contradictions; however, the potential for sexual emancipation was far greater than in the wake of the war. Under Franco, homosexuality was silenced by fear of segregation and legal sentencing to work camps. The censure of poets like Luis Cernuda and Federico García Lorca attests to the muffling of oppositional voices in the public sphere. As noted by Gema Pérez-Sánchez in Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2007), the transition ushered in reflections on queer masculinities, yet women’s voices were given less attention with Ana María Moix as one of the few examples. Over thirty years later, Grandes registers the effects of a culture narrowly defined by heteronormative expectations and vindicates its disruption. The astonishment with which Álvaro responds to Encarnita and Amada’s love story in 2005 reminds us that even decades after the transition, novels and films chronicling the war and dictatorship have been dominated by heterosexual male perspectives and have offered a small range of stereotypes to represent women’s lives. El corazón helado sounds a call to explore such silences further and to question universal narratives. By recording the ongoing negotiations around gender and sexuality, Grandes makes manifest the intersectional nature of

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identities and the ways in which gender politics shape the construction of memory and nostalgia. El corazón exemplifies Hirsch and Miller’s claim that if we are “attentive to hierarchies of gender and sexuality and the power dynamics of contested histories, we find that hidden within what appears to be a universal narrative of rights are uneven and gendered smaller stories, forgotten and submerged plots” (Hirsch and Miller 2011, 7). Álvaro’s decision to embrace the Encarnita/Amada/Teresa kinship underpins a dual critique. His family not only actively participated in the Francoist classist project by accumulating wealth through the theft of Republican lands but also failed to question socially prescribed roles. The realization of the cumulative effects of an ideology rooted in injustice creates an ethical dilemma for Álvaro. In the end, he seeks redress by confronting his mother and siblings about their own responsibility in a history of misappropriation. After his family responds with indifference and hostility, he finds himself uncertain about the future stability of his family ties. This is not a story of reconciliation, but one of fracture, reckoning, and longing. The protagonist’s sense of alienation within his own family, and his desire to belong among the progeny of the dispossessed, points to the experience of many Spaniards interested in distancing themselves from the Franco regime. Although what I have analyzed here involves only a fraction of the epic narrative that Grandes constructs, it serves to illustrate the centrality of nostalgia in El corazón helado and its potential to coexist with a thought-provoking inquiry into the construction of histories, memories, roots, and identities. CHILDHOOD MEMORIES OF RESISTANCE IN EL LECTOR DE JULIO VERNE At this point, I will turn to a comparatively shorter and more recent novel by Grandes to explore how the author’s nostalgic gaze extends beyond her epic masterpiece. El lector de Julio Verne and El corazón helado both involve women’s stories of resistance and dramatize the development of historical consciousness whereby narrators confront their own families’ histories of complicity and come to identify with histories of resistance. Whereas El corazón helado spans over a full century and centers on the experience of adults, El lector de Julio Verne focuses on the lives of children in the postwar. The author portrays the sons and daughters of Republicans and Nationalists as eyewitnesses in a landscape of ideological conflict. Messy moral choices and the process of conscientization constitute the dramatic tension and produce a counter-discourse that exposes the regimes’ military culture and justification of gender, economic, and political violence. Significantly, Grandes chooses a young boy as the protagonist. His experience of inner

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exile, characterized by feelings of otherness in Franco’s Spain, becomes the catalyst for transformation and principled resistance to toxic masculinity. The figure of the young boy provides a powerful channel through which to explore the themes of gender socialization, lost innocence, and nostalgia, along with the lasting traumatic consequences of state violence on identity formation. Through the lens of childhood memories, the author envisions radical acts of collective responsibility and resistance to the segregation of political “others,” as well as alternatives to the class and gender structures of Franco’s Spain. Grandes colors the experience of political persecution with a sense of fellowship, thereby defining a nuanced place of origins that challenges the regime’s hegemonic narratives. The novel is a coming-of-age story narrated by Nino, a nine-year-old son of a civil guard—now an adult reflecting on his formative years—1947 to 1949. Like other historical novels and films such as Manuel Rivas’s well-known short story turned feature film La lengua de las mariposas (1996), the power of literature and education is a motif that runs throughout the novel and emphasizes the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of the Second Republic. But whereas La lengua de las mariposas takes place before the war, the backdrop of El lector de Julio Verne is the postwar. Similar to the case of Dulce Chacón, the novel reveals a move from a sense of nostalgia for the prewar past to the postwar period, which becomes the setting for a new interpretation of anti-fascist resistance and Republican forms of identity. The years represented in the novel were crucial for the Republican resistance fighters, known as the maquis. From 1939–1945, the war against fascism in Europe provided Republicans in exile and within Spain with a sense of hope in an allied victory. As Gina Herrmann explains, many loyalists took to Spain’s rugged mountainous regions, which offered them an escape from reprisals and a space to organize Communist, Marxist, and Anarchist resistance operations (Herrmann 2006). Such activities required a network of sympathizers who risked their lives to provide the maquis with the necessities for survival. “Supplying the armed resistance in some rural areas raised the morale of the defeated population until, that is, the savage reprisals taken by the authorities took their toll of popular support. Support networks, when discovered, were dismantled with violence: Detention, torture, and execution awaited anyone captured who had offered material aid or shelter to the guerrillas” (Herrmann 2006). By the end of World War II, Republican hope in an allied overthrow of the Franco dictatorship had diminished, and the regime further consolidated its power through unfettered practices of state control. To wipe out any remaining resistance, the civil guard tightly controlled rural base areas and increased pressure on civilians providing support to the guerrilla groups. Between 1951–1952, the communist party in exile ordered a withdrawal of the guerrilla units, but many remained in hiding.

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To depict that setting, Grandes weaves together extensive archival research and oral histories into numerous plotlines that deconstruct Francoist narratives of the guerrilla. The story of the protagonist is based on the reallife story of the author’s friend, Cristino—who was the son of a low-paid civil guard in Franco’s police forces. Growing up in the barracks of a small town in the southern region of Jaén, Cristino witnessed the nightmarish interrogation of political prisoners and the slow unraveling of his father who was often sent on dangerous patrols to track down and capture rebel groups. The ethical issues in the novel thus pivot upon the way in which the author represents this young character and his struggles to negotiate his own identity within the context of marginalizing classifications and foundational inequalities. The drama unfolds as the nine-year-old boy begins private lessons in typography to train to become an administrative assistant. That plotline allows the author to bring together two characters from apparently different worlds—Nino, the son of a civil guard and Doña Elena, a one-time Republican schoolteacher, now private tutor living on the outskirts of the village with a group of widowed Republican women who provide a safe house for resisters operating in the region. It is through the relationship between these characters that the author conceptualizes a virtual community based on kinship that goes beyond the biological family or political party. As the title of the novel suggests, the author carves out a space to explore the socio-political dimension of education and literature, and in doing so reaffirms the significance of the educational projects of the Second Republic. Through the voices, attitudes, and actions of the characters, the author places in stark contrast the possibilities that the Republic represented on the one hand and the stagnation and injustice of Nationalist Spain on the other. While this narrative motif may seem to inscribe the novel within a familiar nostalgic premise—that of the dawn of progressive movements in 1931 and their violent elimination in 1939—it provides an opportunity to look beyond the discourse of aberration and to trace the more profound roots of Republican Spain and its surviving legacy even in the aftermath of war. Intertextual references to 19th-century thinkers, like Galdós, underscore the enduring tradition of engagement with issues involving gender and class inequalities. Grandes thus historicizes the narrative of resistance, mapping out a cultural lineage that undermines the regime’s crusade propaganda that fashioned their mission as a necessary reconquest and cleansing of cultural deviance. By broadening the scope, Grandes invokes an extensive history of struggle, which in turn yields a reflection on the relationship between the past and the present. The author goes beyond superficial understandings of the period through references to nineteenth and early-twentieth century authors, as well as through a diverse cast of characters, elaborate plotlines, and settings. Prominent figures include Pepe the Portuguese, Sanchís, and Catalina la Rubia.

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Pepe the Portuguese is a guerrilla liaison who secretly communicates critical information for the cause of the anti-Franco resistance. Sanchís is a civil guard who pursues the guerillas while he clandestinely collaborates with them. Catalina la Rubia is a mother of nine children and the widowed matriarch of a community of women who have lost their husbands, siblings, and fathers in the war or the underground resistance. The novel’s narrative landscapes are as important as the characters. Through setting, the author casts light on how the desire for a familiar geographic “home” intersects with a longing for a sense of political, social, and emotional belonging. If notions of male superiority and colonial subjugation of the defeated Republicans shaped the National-Catholic ideology, then Grandes exposes and subverts such discourses by moving the experiences of non-Catholic leftist women and children from the margins to the center. The author contrasts two primary settings: the town and the farmhouse. The town represents the public sphere under the regime: a policed zone of class and gender inequality. It is a masculinized and colonized site where the horrors of imprisonment, economic ostracism, and gender hierarchies are vividly portrayed. For example, the spouse of the leading rebel leader, Cencerro, is sentenced to six years in prison for revealing the identity of her unborn child’s father who had been in hiding. Her body is cast within the NationalCatholic discourse as deviant and inferior, while her unborn child is deemed illegitimate. Through this detail, the author suggests that socially constructed categories of gender and class formed the foundation of structural inequalities in Franco’s Spain. The author depicts the intersections of discrimination (gender, class, politics) and suggests that legal policies regulating women’s bodies served in the larger process of internal colonization. The town is a masculinized site, but the farmhouse, by contrast, is a feminized site. It is populated by Republican women—mothers, widows, and daughters bonded together not through blood ties, but shared experience and a commitment to the collective. The farmhouse is the location of geographic inner exile—literally on the fringes of society. At the same time, this landscape takes on a utopic character precisely because it is apart from the town center and in some measure disconnected from the dominant values of the military regime. The periphery becomes the place of social belonging. Displacement from the center allows the marginalized to bond together and to ease the suffering of alienation produced by internal exile. As I stated earlier, this representation contrasts with the image of inner exile depicted by postwar authors like Laforet and Matute to the extent that Grandes’s characters find a community that transforms the pain of expulsion into a meaningful experience. If the author’s description of the inhospitable winter nights comes to signify the hostile social climate of the public sphere under Franco, then the warm summer days symbolize the vibrant communal life of the farmhouse. The author imagines a territory that overturns the power dynam-

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ics and inequalities of Francoist society. Strong female-centered networks bring together dislocated Republicans. Single mothers support one another in creating stable homes for their children. In this way, Grandes challenges the Francoist official characterization of this kind of family as “dysfunctional” and upends the regime’s rhetoric on traditional family values, which served during the Franco years to mask state violence and delegitimize the diversity of family forms. The nostalgia with which the author constructs the Republican women of the farmhouse is explicit. For the narrator, they made the spring of 1948 a foundational positive memory: “the best life that I had ever had; days of books, words, and laughter . . . exciting days, days of adventures and secrets (Grandes 2012, 189, my translation). 11 In that time-space, the narrator forms an alternative conception of ideal womanhood, indicating that instead of being suited for a girl with bows and tights he’d be better off with “una cabra montesa” [a mountain goat] (Grandes 2012, 384) like the free-spirited Republican women of the farmhouse. In nostalgically imagining this site and the characters that populate it, the author offers a microcosm that effectively becomes a counterpoint to the dominant image of the patriarchal family glorified by the National-Catholic state. But such nostalgia is also unsettling. It is through the Republican women of the farmhouse that Nino sees firsthand how identity markers, including political affiliation, gender, religion, and class, determined access to status and power. They live on the margins of society—in a state of poverty, which Francoist society found deserved. Nino’s desire for a home within a virtual family of political dissidents sits alongside his love for his biological family, and specifically a father employed by the regime. The child is haunted by a set of rules that defined gender roles in Francoist society, and he is tormented by the idea that his father contributed to the politically engineered inequality and animosity of postwar Spain. He longs to belong within the leftist collectivities that defied political, class, and gender hierarchies, but that longing is unsettling. The development of relationships between politically diverse characters brings out the complexities of the historical moment while facilitating a reflection on the political and gendered positions that shaped them. To this point, I have argued that Almudena Grandes reimagines the experience of inner exile as a time of political resistance to totalitarian practices. In doing so, she bespeaks a longing to reclaim a cultural continuity in opposition to the regime’s reductive nationalist narratives. Progressive women are recast as survivors, not as victims, and the story of repression and struggle becomes the story of courage. At the same time, Grandes complicates these experiences in the interest of contributing to plural understandings of the destruction of dictatorial violence. Upholding a spirit of opposition to Manichean narratives of essential identities, she illustrates the myriad entanglements of roots. Within the village setting, the novel stages the difficult and

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shifting political positions between families who secretly supported the opposition and those who denounced them, showing how Francoism enforced an alienating binary, which, as historian Helen Graham suggests “diminished and even in some cases destroyed [not only the vanquished but also] the victors.” (Graham 2004, 324). The author underscores the devastating effects of the regime’s socio-economic apparatus and patriarchal structures by incorporating unpredictable characterizations and plotlines into her narrative repertoire. Readers are always aware of her ideological compass, yet she recognizes the painful existence of moral ambiguities. The character that best represents the author’s subversion of the typically nostalgic discourse of good and evil is the main character’s father—Antonino. He is a Civil Guard who feigns his allegiance to the New State after witnessing the murder of his Republican father and grandfather during the war. He is perhaps the most tormented character, guilt-ridden and hated by villagers on both sides of the political divide. Both Antonino and his wife Mercedes (the narrator’s mother) experience another form of inner exile, living on a tenuous fault-line. They experience the permanent threat of betrayal by those Republicans who know his family’s story, as well as the regressive economic policies of the regime. A turning point in the novel involves the narrator’s discovery of his father’s hidden Republican past and his subsequent collaboration (under threat) in the murder of one of the resistance fighters. The author thus portrays the messy and confounding interrelation between anti-authoritarian resistance fighters and a range of participants in various forms of repression, who also suffered from the divisive political and economic framework that benefitted the landed oligarchy and ruling military elites. The characterization of the father also constitutes a critique of postwar masculinities. As Lorraine Ryan argues, “the father-figure, Antonino, incapable of transmitting a coherent and aspirational prototype of masculinity, ceases to be a credible paternal figure for his son Nino, who then embarks on a literary and relational exploration of masculinity” (Ryan 2014, 4). From my perspective, what is most significant is Nino’s transformative relationship with strong female characters that challenge prevailing gender ideology. As I explained earlier, through the farmhouse setting and the characters that inhabit it, the author subverts the dominant image of the patriarchal family. The novel ends with the culmination of the process of reflection on the part of the narrator. He witnesses the arduous struggle of the guerrillas and their final decision to flee. Following their escape to France, the town becomes for Nino an ashen wasteland. He recalls viewing a black and white photo of participants in the resistance (Filo and Elías) along with their newborn son in exile in Toulouse. As he looks at the photograph, he is reminded of another photograph of himself as a baby with his parents before the war. In his mind’s eye he sees the two photographs side-by-side and thinks: “the

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smiles were identical, also identical was the expression of placidity and of happiness of those two couples separated by time and by history” (Grandes 2012, 352, my translation). 12 The picture moves Nino to feel of both comfort and pain, nostalgia and melancholia. He is included and excluded from the histories that the photos represent. By seeing a resemblance of himself in the photographic image of the baby in exile, he attempts to imagine an alternative genealogy. As Marianne Hirsch suggests in Family Frames, the photograph serves a unique role in the “process of self-discovery, a discovery of a self in relation” (Hirsch 1997, 2). Grandes stages Hirsch’s claim that when war shatters relationships and exile shapes lives, “photographs provide perhaps even more than usual some illusion of continuity over time and space” (Hirsch 1997, xi). Photography becomes a source of nostalgia, and an object imbued not only with meaning but also galvanizing potential. It is significant that shortly after the photograph scene, readers learn that Nino takes on the political struggle of the resistance as a university student. The image and text work together in an “entangled narrative web” that tells a complex story of loss, longing and recovery (Hirsch 1997, 4). This beautifully rendered scene is the literary version of what the Almudena Grandes website achieves, as I explained at the opening of this chapter. REFRAMING NOSTALGIA An analysis of these novels allows us to reframe nostalgia as an emotionally charged form of memory evoked by a sense of loss and capable of raising collective consciousness about the significance of the past for the future. In El corazón helado, Grandes underscores the unbroken structures allowing for the immense accumulation of wealth and power, and in doing so, frames the post-dictatorship as a continuum in which entrenched systems of power remain intact. Dark pessimism, however, does not dominate since she weaves hope through voices of resistance. In El lector de Julio Verne, readers are confronted with stories of patriarchal political violence and forced displacement, but we also envision the survival of a lineage inspired by revolutionary ideals. The author thus brings the intersections of oppression into a forum alongside a debate about the need to salvage repressed histories for the present. As Hirsh and Miller state, “This dual vision can combine the desire for “home,” and the concreteness and materiality of place and connection, with a concomitant, ethical commitment to carefully contextualized and differentiated practices of witness, restoration of rights, and acts of repair” (Hirsh and Miller 2011, 5). Almudena Grandes allows us to imagine nostalgia’s potential within a broader framework that spotlights the legacies of systematic economic theft,

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as well as the present-day desire to recuperate lost sites like properties and Republican places of memory. Similar to the case of Carmen Castillo and Carolina Astudillo, Grandes conveys a desire to reconstruct silenced histories of progressive politics and empowered women, while simultaneously articulating an understanding of the subjective, complex, and incomplete nature of memorial representation. My discussion of these works addresses the larger matter of memory and representation of war and dictatorial violence and how nostalgia for a revolutionary past can be conveyed in nuanced and thoughtprovoking ways through literature. NOTES 1. “Hay historias que nuestros padres y abuelos nunca han querido contarnos. Algunas porque fueron tan heroicas que no soportaríamos conocer su final. Otras porque fueron tan ruines que jamás podríamos perdonarlas. Historias que de entrada parecen mentira y que al final siempre han sido verdad. Historias que nos helarían el corazón.” 2. “Esa señora había desaparecido, se había evaporado, se había desprendido como una cáscara inútil del cuerpo ágil, elástico e infatigable de una mujer joven con el rostro de muchacha. . . . Era como si Teresa González hubiera vuelto a nacer, por dentro pero también por fuera” (Grandes 2007, 178). 3. “tienen que arrasarla, humillarla, destrozarla para que vuelva a surgir pura, nueva, limpia” (Grandes 2007, 183). 4. “En el fondo de su corazón, Teresa González se sentía culpable, y por mucho que se supiera de memoria la lección de los indeseables vestigios del tradicionalismo reaccionario y clerical, que anidan en el subconsciente femenino como pájaros traidores a los que hay que eliminar a toda costa, se sentía mucho más cómoda fuera de casa que dentro” (Grandes 2007, 180). 5. “Julio nunca se había sentido tan importante, tan orgulloso de su madre. Tampoco había sentido jamás el borde del abismo . . . cuando comprendió que se avecinaba un final inevitable” (Grandes 2007, 181). 6. “no puedes calcular el orgullo que siento de ser tu nieto. . . . Teresa, he admirado tanto a la gente como tú . . . y ya sé que esta victoria póstuma, simbólica y tardía nunca te consolará de aquella derrota pero tú, hoy, has ganado la guerra, abuela” (Grandes 2007, 305). 7. “Su imagen desató en mi interior una oleada de amor repentino, profunda pero ambigua, porque no sólo tenía que ver con ella, sino conmigo, con todo lo que había ganado y había perdido al perder a mi padre, al ganar a mi abuela, al consentir con una alegría rara y furiosa” (Grandes 2007, 387) 8. “el fantasma de mi abuela Teresa volaba sobre nuestras cabezas igual que la estela brillante de un hada madrina, una presencia dulce y benéfica” (Grandes 2007, 398). 9. “Tu abuela no se escondía al salir a la calle, ni estaba arrepentida, ni tenía mala cara, nada de nada. Al revés, estaba como unas pascuas, daba gusto verla, porque estaba segura de que tenía derecho a hacer lo que quisiera. Ella era así, y a mí eso también me parece bien, qué quieres que te diga, me da envidia, porque. . . . Entonces se calló de pronto, igual que si se hubiera mordido la lengua, y me dirigió una mirada de alarma que no pude interpretar” (Grandes 2007, 400). 10. “Había algo heroico y algo familiar, algo ejemplar y algo pequeño, algo grandioso y algo conocido, algo maravilloso y algo cotidiano, algo español y algo universal en Teresa Gonzáles Puerto, y todos esos ingredientes desembocaban en el mismo sitio, que era yo. Yo me habría enamorado de ti abuela. Si hubiera tenido tu edad, si te hubiera conocido en el 36, si no hubiera sido tu nieto” (Grandes 2007, 409).

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11. “la mejor vida que había tenido jamás, días de libros, de palabras, de risas . . . fueron días emocionantes aquellos, días aventureros y secretos, casi clandestinos” (Grandes 2012, 189). 12. “las sonrisas eran idénticas, idéntica la expresión de placidez, de felicidad, de aquellas dos parejas separadas por el tiempo y por la historia” (Grandes 2012, 352).

Chapter Six

Detective Pursuits of an Ironic Nostalgic Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante

NOSTALGIA AND IRONY In the conclusion of The Future of Nostalgia, Boym compares the act of recollection to the act of gazing into a rearview mirror: “There should be a special warning on the sideview mirror: The object of nostalgia is further away than it appears” (Boym 2001, 354). The mirror reflects an image that does not possess nostalgia, but the mirror image becomes the focus of nostalgic desire. Longing arises from “an interaction between subjects and objects, between actual landscapes and the landscapes of the mind” (Boym 2001, 354). Contrary to common belief, Boym explains, nostalgia is similar to irony since they are both forms of resistance that allow affection and reflection to be combined (2001, 354). “On the other side of ironic estrangement might be emotion and longing; they are yoked as two sides of a coin” (Boym 2001, 354). But if irony involves implicit and uneasy double meanings and often humoristic suggestions of alternative or multiple interpretations that overturn the surface message, then not all nostalgic longing is yoked to irony. Consciousness of the distance and distortions that are inherent in that rearview mirror image reflecting the past is what distinguishes settling from unsettling forms of nostalgia. Dramatic irony, for David Lodge, is generated “When the reader is made aware of a disparity between the facts of a situation and the characters’ understanding of it” (Lodge 1993, 179). As I see it, when dramatic irony combines with wistful memory, unsettling nostalgia emerges. 165

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The representation of unsettling nostalgia in literature not only coexists but, in some cases, depends upon dramatic irony. Through the art of fiction, nostalgic longing can unsettle readers at the moment that it becomes evident that nostalgia has more to do with a sense of lack in the present than it does with the past. Moments of self-discovery and critique of one's own contradictions, inauthenticity, and shortcomings set within the larger process of recollection destabilizes any flawless or grandiose portrait of the past. Both irony and unsettling nostalgia are oppositional in nature as they resist the deceptive appearances of any past perfection as much as they confront the disenchanted present. Boym beautifully captures the complexity and value of nostalgia when she writes that it “can be both a social disease and a creative emotion, a poison and a cure. . . . Acknowledging our collective and individual nostalgias, we can smile at them, revealing a line of imperfect teeth stained by the ecologically impure water of our native cities” (Boym 2001, 354–55). These reflections on the relationship between nostalgia and irony serve as an entryway to my interpretation of the novel Estrella distante (1996) by the widely acclaimed author Roberto Bolaño. Born in 1953, Bolaño spent his childhood in Chile until his family moved to Mexico City in 1968 when he was fifteen. During the late 1960s, he came of age within the context of political unrest and mass demonstrations that were violently suppressed. Shortly after, he headed first to El Salvador then back to Chile in 1973. One month later, at the age of twenty, Pinochet launched the CIA-backed military coup that would lead to seventeen years of dictatorship. His accounts suggest that he stayed in Chile for five months and worked with underground resistance networks in Concepción until he was briefly detained. After his release, he returned to Mexico then moved to Paris and ultimately Barcelona, where he lived until his untimely death at age fifty in 2003. 1 While most accept this account, some have raised questions regarding the reliability of his story. 2 What is clear, and most pertinent to this study, is Bolaño’s view that September 11, 1973, was a defining political moment that would come to signify rupture and loss. The novel Estrella distante is a reflection on time, memory, and nostalgia that flashes backward and forward. It questions the ways in which the military coup has unraveled again and again in the minds of those who experienced it, as well as in the minds of those who stood on the sidelines and ended up feeling uncertainty, sorrow, and regret for their own inaction. Similar to Roberto Brodsky and Carolina Astudillo, Roberto Bolaño was shaped by the historical and cultural contexts of both Chile and Spain in the 1970s and 1980s and explored in his writings the transatlantic connections between fascist ideologies in Spain and Chile that I have traced in Unsettling Nostalgia. Situating Bolaño within a comparative framework produces valuable insights that might otherwise be ignored. Additionally, an analysis of Bolaño’s fiction within a book on nostalgia may seem surprising to some

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readers with a skeptical, if not narrow, understanding of nostalgia. If nostalgia is merely a self-indulgent longing for a homeland or a feel-good form of remembering that dilutes at best and, at worst, evacuates the complexities of the past, then Bolaño’s narrative defies the nostalgic mode. But, as I have illustrated throughout this book, unsettling nostalgia centers on sociopolitical environments instead of mythical homelands, and also questions its own sources and significance. Many critics have correctly argued that what makes Bolaño’s work so remarkable is its critique of impunity, willed blindness, and complicity in the post-Pinochet aftermath (Draper, Lazzara, Martín Cabrera, Franco). While I agree with these critics, I contend that Bolaño’s writing also transmits an alternative form of nostalgia that is at once ironic, oppositional, and poignant. It is an unsettling nostalgia that understands that individual and collective experiences of alienation and disillusionment in the present fuel technicolored memories of participation and shared optimism. Bolaño’s nostalgia is also a form of longing that self-consciously grapples with the making and unmaking of gendered myths, utopias, and dystopias. With a deliberate effort to elaborate on issues of gender and sexuality, this chapter frames Estrella distante as an unsettling nostalgic novel that confronts dominant narratives of the Right and the Left and illuminates the ways in which longing shapes conspiracy theories and Manichean scripts of heroes and villains. 3 MEMORY AND MOTIVATION The narrative form of Estrella distante is akin to El corazón helado by Almudena Grandes insofar as both revolve around plots of historical intrigue wherein the narrator/protagonist investigates unsolved crimes perpetrated against women who challenged patriarchal practices and fascist culture. What is different about Bolaño is his employment and subversion of the narrative strategies of the detective novel and the historical novel, merging fact and fiction so that the reader has difficulty discerning the boundaries between them. Similar to the author, the semi-autobiographical narrator is a novelist and poet who left Chile after the coup and eventually moved to Barcelona. His story begins in Blanes in 1996 during an early period of investigation of human rights violations following the plebiscite that ended dictatorial rule. The narrative unfolds around a secret investigation of the murders of the Garmendia sisters who were the narrator’s former friends at the University of Concepción. Based solely on conjectures and a maze of literary texts, the narrator deduces that the sisters were murdered, dismembered and “disappeared” by one of their Allende-era acquaintances named Carlos Wieder who had infiltrated their poetry workshop under the pseudonym Alberto Ruiz-Tagle.

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The narrator’s actions and behaviors are the result of his motivations, which involve the need for redress as well as a desire to maintain a connection to a fragmented community. As a novel constructed around a firstperson monologue, readers gain insight into the narrator’s drive through his descriptions of the Allende years, which are threaded throughout the story. Glowing memories of his former poetry group torn asunder by the military coup signal the extent to which nostalgia sustains his search. He conjures the memory of the “undisputed stars” of the poetry workshop, Angelica and Veronica Garmendia, whose names connote innocence and the victory of truth. Their very presence at the center of a traditionally male-dominated space points to a time of sexual liberation characterized by the questioning of traditional codes of behavior and by movements for the empowerment of women and sexual minorities that had long been marginalized and socially policed. The following passage, taken from the first page of Estrella distante, offers the initial indication that the novel is steeped with a longing for the cultural environment of the UP years, which the narrator associates with youth and the shared excitement about endless possibilities: Most of us there talked a lot, not just about poetry but politics, travel (little did we know what our travels would be like) painting, architecture, photography, revolution and the armed struggle that would usher in a new life and a new era, so we thought, but which, for most of us, was like a dream, or rather the key that would open the door into a world of dreams, the only dreams worth living for. (Bolaño 2004, 3) 4

These nostalgic musings, which set the entire tone of the novel, echo recollections of the author’s own experience as described in various essays and interviews including the following 2005 dialogue with Eliseo Álvarez republished in Bolaño por sí mismo: “Being a poet was like being a revolutionary and being totally open to any cultural manifestation, to any sexual expression, in short, open to everything, to any experience with drugs. Tolerance was . . . more than tolerance, a word that we did not like very much, it was universal kinship, something totally utopian. (my translation). 5 Nostalgia colors these memories of belonging within a culture committed to creative exploration and social transformation. As the title of the novel suggests, the narrator gazes back to his distant country of origin, whose flag bears a large white star. But similar to the other authors and filmmakers in this book, the nostalgic longing that readers witness never celebrates national grandeur, bygone stability, or lost traditional values. Instead, Bolaño’s longing is reminiscent of Boym’s reflective nostalgia as it deliberately rejects comforting national love affairs (2001, 14). His nostalgia unsettles readers by frustrating normative expectations of revolutionary heroism. If the narrator idealizes the Garmendia sisters through brief vignettes, he also complicates any form of lionization through recollections of his former mentor, Juan Stein, a Trotsky-

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ist poet of Ukrainian Jewish descent. After Stein’s disappearance following the coup, the narrator demonizes Wieder while he consciously elevates Stein to legendary status. As I will explain, he does this with clear-eyed wit that caricatures masculinist narratives of bravery. Similar to the case of Últimos días de la historia, nostalgia for the pre-coup milieu, as well as the atmosphere directly following the coup, becomes a recourse for the narrator in Estrella distante to establish an identity in exile. At the same time, the narrator questions his own idealization of moments and figures of yesteryear, and in doing so, he denaturalizes reductive versions of heroic militancy. Another facet of Bolaño’s unsettling nostalgia involves the use of metafiction. I will illustrate that this literary strategy functions to cast doubt on the attempt to mend memory gaps and discontinuities. The narrator’s constant questioning of his own discourse works to blur the boundaries that separate truth, fiction, imagination, and reality. Metafiction subverts any aim to restore “a coherent and inspiring tale of recovered identity” (Boym 2001, 53). This narrative strategy adds valuable reflection to the unsettling nostalgic mode. The full stories of the Garmendia sisters, Stein, and Wieder all remain inaccessible to both the reader and the narrator. Unlike many classic detective novelists that conclude their mysteries on a final settling note when the solution is produced and justice is achieved, Bolaño raises questions about the meaning of justice. As David Lodge suggests, “A solved mystery is ultimately reassuring to readers, asserting the triumph of reason” (Lodge 1993, 310). In contrast, Estrella distante avoids neat solutions and instead leaves readers with a perturbing vision of impunity. By placing Estrella distante in conversation with the other novels and films in Unsettling Nostalgia, we further expand our scope, recognizing how nostalgia might coexist with irony and resistance to facile understandings of resolution and closure. In what follows, I illustrate how Bolaño’s use of intertexts functions to question the very ability of narrative to recover the past unproblematically. By examining Bolaño’s double focus and what Boym calls “doublespeak,” I argue that the novel captures the longing for the excitement and community associated with the Allende years, as well as the ambivalence and tensions that arise from the act of memorial representation. I also explore how the novel exposes the gendered nature of mythmaking. As a result of the narrator’s constant self-reflection and critical point of view, we gain a better understanding of how restorative nostalgic memories flatten the contours of the past. The narrator interrogates his own idealizing gaze, and in doing so, questions the common reinsertion of heteronormative masculinist narratives of heroism and villainy that characterizes both the political Left and Right. Ultimately, I argue that there is no trace of restorative nostalgia that is not attacked and dismantled through irony and parody. Nostalgia remains at the core of the novel, but it is oppositional and deeply unsettling.

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INTERTEXTS, PALIMPSESTS, AND THE PROBLEM OF RESTORATION The preface informs the reader that Estrella distante is based on the final chapter of a previous work by Bolaño titled La literatura nazi en América (1996). It is a novel that offers a fictional overview of the various types of writers (i.e., short story writers, science fiction writers, poets, prison writers) in the Americas that convey Nazi ideology (fascist, ultranationalist, racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic). The final chapter of Bolaño’s invented encyclopedia, titled “Carlos Ramírez Hoffman,” narrates the events surrounding the murders of the Chilean Venegas sisters and the possible involvement of the neo-fascist aviator-poet Carlos Ramírez Hoffman. This chapter is the foundation of the novel Estrella distante that Arturo B. (aka Arturo Belano, Bolaño’s alter ego) and Bolaño decide to co-write. Bolaño writes that Arturo B. was not satisfied with the previous version and “would have preferred a longer story that, rather than mirror or explode others, would be, in itself, a mirror and an explosion” (Bolaño 2004, 1). The narrator’s desire to produce an explosion and defamiliarize readers is evocative of the narrator in Últimos días de la historia by Roberto Brodsky, who, as I explained in Chapter 1, also seeks to blow up familiar narrative forms to provoke critical consciousness. The preface also alludes to the “animated ghost of Pierre Ménard” to cast doubt on the process of recollection and representation and by extension undermine the restorative nostalgic mode. “Pierre Menard, autor del Quixote,” published in 1939 by Jorge Luis Borges, is a story in the form of a literary review about Menard, the twentieth-century French writer who undertook the recreation of the first part of Don Quixote by Cervantes. Borges’s narrator considers Menard’s version of Don Quixote even better than the original masterpiece. He explains Menard’s approach was to know Spanish well, to recover the Catholic faith, to forget the history of Europe between the years of 1602 and 1918, and to be Miguel de Cervantes. Menard later finds this approach too easy and decides that he must go on being Pierre Menard and reach Quixote through his own experiences, drawing from all that he has absorbed from other great writers. To demonstrate how Menard’s Quixote is superior to the original, the narrator offers a fragment of each work. The fact that the two pieces are identical is one of the most humorous and ironic elements of Borges's text, for it points to the narrator’s absurd legitimization of Menard’s work, which he considers academic heroism. The narrator argues that insofar as Menard’s version is read in the modern context, it reverberates more powerfully because Cervantes’s words are shot through with new meanings. Estrella distante, like Borges’s story, is a text that ruminates on questions of representation. Bolaño’s invented narrator (Arturo B.) is a second Bolaño,

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who seeks to unearth and “restore” the original story, but with thoughtprovoking self-conscious irony. Estrella distante is a palimpsest on which the original writing (La literatura nazi en América) has been effaced to make room for new interpretations. Instead of weaving traumatic experiences into a flawless historical framework, Bolaño orchestrates a metafictional hybrid detective narrative that underscores the inability to produce a single complete version of the past. By drawing from and subverting the techniques of the historical novel and detective novel in a narrative form that destabilizes any individual voice of authority, Bolaño denounces the kind of teleological historiography disseminated by the regime, while avoiding the attempt to rewrite history. RECALLING RUPTURE, CONSTRUCTING CONSPIRACIES Intertexts function in the novel to display contradictory or double-coded meanings. As a point of comparison, Bolaño’s reference to other texts contrasts with Chacón’s restorative nostalgic intertextual employment of documents and past motifs (i.e., allusions to the Trece Rosas, etc.). These two authors, however, share a similar approach to narrative structure. The non-linear or un-chronological narrative form of stroytelling in Estrella distante is similar to that of La voz dormida, as well as all of the works in this book, to the extent that the author flashes forward and backward to underscore the workings of memory. Similar to the case of Ultimos días de la historia, the first-person narrator of Estrella distante begins the story in the 1990s, then moves back in time to the years of the Popular Unity. Through narrative leaps and reflection, Bolaño underscores the notion that any attempt to narrate past is an act of memory and a re-creation reliant on the imagination. Bolaño’s reconstruction is largely based on speculation, rumors, and a variety of texts, which he uses not to confirm their legitimacy, but rather to call it into question. The narrator’s retrospective account of the days surrounding September 11, 1973, sparks thought on the seemingly incongruous coexistence of fear and excitement bound together in nostalgic recollection. His portrait of that volatile scenario is imbued with an unambiguous longing that stems from his own current state of isolation, boredom, and despair. In memory, the night before the disappearance of Angélica and Verónica Garmendia was the best of his life: Suddenly I felt happy, immensely happy, capable of anything, although I was aware that meanwhile all that I believed in was collapsing forever, and that many people, several friends of mine among them, were being hunted down or tortured. But I felt like singing and dancing, and the bad news (or the depressing commentaries on the bad news) only added fuel to the fire of my joy, to

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Predating his own inaction and disillusionment, the narrator describes a moment of idealism, greater possibilities, and a site of origins from which everything would unfold. The repeated emphasis on a heightened collective emotional state contrasts with the solitary disenchantment of the post-dictatorial present. The past is a distant star and yearning for that environment and the individuals that populated it is bittersweet as they become forever out of reach. Nostalgia and the creation of conspiracy theories often go hand in hand as a response to the fears produced by cataclysm. That is a point of which the narrator seems acutely aware as he looks back on the tumultuous days following the coup. The disappearance of the Garmendia twins symbolizes a point of rupture and the end of an epoch. In memory, his brief imprisonment at La Peña detention center, their disappearance, and his arrival at a hypothesis of their whereabouts become one cloudy event. After his release, he reunites with Bibiano and Fat Marta, the only two remaining friends from the poetry workshop. Marta’s interpretation of a conversation that she had with Ruiz-Tagle becomes the foundation upon which the narrator bases his theory about the disappearance of the Garmendia sisters. In that dialogue, RuizTagle had suggested that all of the women in the poetry group were dead. Days later, Bibiano, Marta, and Arturo B. conclude that Ruiz-Tagle was indeed Carlos Wieder and that he killed Angélica and Verónica. What follows is an imagined reconstruction of the crime scene, wherein Ruiz-Tagle/ Wieder visits the sisters at their isolated country home in Nacimiento and slays them during the night after which time he and the secret police slip away without a trace. This description allows readers to imagine how individuals and groups often deal with the uncertainty, moral crisis, and sorrow rising from political persecution. The narrator desperately attempts to build a story even while he voices doubts about the logic of his version. By encouraging, but at the same time frustrating, the search for truth, Estrella distante presents the reader with competing ways of approaching the past. The author characterizes an overtly restorative nostalgic narrator who is at the same time ironic and self-satirizing. Boym reminds us that the term irony is rooted in Ancient Greek meaning dissimulation and feigned ignorance (Boym 2001, 354). Bolaño uses an ironic narrator as a literary technique to comment on the creation of myth and a conspiratorial worldview based on an unfounded plot. He illustrates what Boym calls “a Manichean battle of good and evil and the scapegoating of the mythical enemy” (Boym 2001,

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43). According to Boym, conspiracy theory is the cornerstone of restorative nostalgia: Conspiracy is used pejoratively, to designate a subversive kinship of others, an imagined community based on exclusion more than affection, a union of those who are not with us, but against us. Home is not made of individual memories but of collective projections and ‘rational delusions.’ Paranoiac reconstruction of home is predicated on the fantasy of persecution. This is not simply ‘forgetting of reality’ but a psychotic substitution of actual experiences with a dark conspiratorial vision: the creation of a delusionary homeland. Tradition in this way is to be restored with a nearly apocalyptic vengeance. (Boym 2001, 43)

Boym argues that insecurities and fear fuel the restorative nostalgic longing for a conspiracy theory together with an individual or collective scapegoat that can be held responsible for a multitude of societal problems. Insofar as the narrator’s self-reflective comments open a space to think about the process by which conspiracy theories and scapegoats are created, Bolaño offers a compelling critique of the dictatorship’s Manichean discourse that utilized scapegoating as a tool of propaganda. The novel self-consciously separates the characters into conflicting camps: one that is compassionate and progressive and the other that is reactionary and misogynist. But unlike Chacón, who attempts to denounce the Franco regime’s monolithic discourse by replacing it with her own monologic narrative, Bolaño ultimately complicates his own claims. Rather than attempt to unsilence marginalized voices “intact,” he provokes a profound reflection on memory, history, and the making of myth. At every turn the narrator makes evident the workings of his own nostalgic response, inviting readers to consider how individuals make selective use of memory, how we reduce, vilify, universalize, and fail to recognize contradiction and incongruity. Bolaño’s politically and aesthetically challenging form of storytelling is part and parcel of a lucid critique of a military regime that seized and maintained power through an authoritarian narrative of essentialism, exclusion, and absolutism. If Bolaño employs literary strategies such as metafiction and intertextuality to undermine the authority of any single text, and by extension erode the foundation of the regime’s nationalist discourse, he also uses parody to question the anti-hegemonic discourses of Chile’s neo-avant-garde. In Chile in Transition, Michael Lazzara argues, “These artists frequently employed techniques such as fragmentation, montage, and collage as ways of contravening the dictatorial state’s rigid surveillance of language” (Lazzara 2006, 43). Some might contend that nothing exemplifies the unorthodox methods of the Chilean neo-avant-garde more than Raúl Zurita’s project to write a poem in the sky. After writing Purgatorio (1979) and Anteparaíso (1982) (works inspired by his travels across Chile’s Atacama Desert and by Dante’s Divine Comedy), Zurita hired a pilot to write his poem “Vida Nueva” in New York

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City’s sky. Written in smoke, some of the verses read, “MI DIOS ES HAMBRE, MI DIOS ES NIEVE” (“MY GOD IS HUNGER, MY GOD IS SNOW”; Zurita 1986, 1). Cultural critic Nelly Richard suggests in The Insubordination of the Sign, that the neo-avant-garde, “advanced the militancy of a socially committed art that sought to transcend restrictive definitions of art and politics” (Richard 2004, 28–29). While it is never explicit, Estrella distante communicates a more critical view of the neo-avant-garde, thereby complicating binary discourses of the Left and Right. More specifically, Bolaño responds critically to Zurita’s work through parody as Wieder’s aerial poetry written from a Nazi-era fighter aircraft cites the Bible in Latin and refers to the beginning of the world; “IN PRINCIPIO . . . CREAVIT DEUS . . . COELUM ET TERRAM (Bolaño 2005, 36–37). In a subsequent show, the aviator-poet writes verses such as “La muerte es amistad, La muerte es Chile” (Bolaño 2005, 90–91) [“Death is friendship, Death is Chile; Bolaño 2004, 80–81”]. This parody interrogates the ways in which Zurita’s poetry has confronted the dictatorship and exposes the uneasy points of convergence between discourses. Bolaño’s edgy imitation, coupled with the narrator’s constant self-critique and apprehension, makes the novel an attack against any master narrative or discourse that reflects the pretensions to speak with the voice of authority. Bolaño’s parody signals a larger commentary on messianism and eschatologies for their assumptions that mystical forces influence tragedies and their resolutions. Therein lies a transatlantic subversion of the restorative nostalgic mode. We should recall that restorative nostalgia in both Franco’s Spain and Pinochet’s Chile was rooted in the belief that the revolutionary social mobilization of the 1930s and 1970s marked a moment of societal decay inevitably linked to evil supernatural forces that disrupted a righteous colonial heritage. According to Boym restorative nostalgia is characterized by essentialist discourses that gaze backward in search of authentic origins and stable meanings. Recalling Boym’s description, restorative nostalgia seeks a “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home and generates every reactionary version of the sentiment—nationalist, heritage—fixated, fundamentalist, etc.” (Boym 2001, 41). Through parody and irony, Bolaño dramatizes a critique of both messianism and restorative nostalgia, which characterize discourses on both ends of the political spectrum and speak through both religious and secular voices. PHOTOS AND ENGENDERED HEROES As I have suggested throughout Unsettling Nostalgia, memory and nostalgia cannot be disconnected from individual and collective identity. In Estrella distante, the narrator evokes the past to distance himself from the consolida-

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tors of the regime. At the same time, he associates himself with the figure of Juan Stein, who comes to symbolize the symbiosis of artistic imagination and political commitment. Nourishing nostalgic memories of Stein becomes a way to hold onto an identity associated with counterculture movements torn apart by the military coup. In Yearning for Yesterday, Davis states that nostalgia often looks longingly backward rather than forward for the familiar rather than the novel and for certainty rather than discovery (Davis 1979, 108–9). Estrella distante allows us to see nostalgia from a different vantage point: the narrator looks backward to a time that appears full of new possibilities, of collective discovery and self-exploration in contrast with a stagnant and solitary here-and-now. But he seems to be acutely aware that his view of his former life in Concepción always passes through a filter, or rather a colored lens that adds beauty and highlights desires while it fades out any unappealing elements. That lens creates a greater contrast with the monotone present. The unconcealed awareness of such technicolored nostalgic filters is evident in the narrator’s sweeping idealization of the leader of his poetry workshop: “Like the story of Chile itself in those years, the story of Juan Stein, who ran our poetry workshop, is larger than life” (Bolaño 2004, 47). 7 He wistfully remembers Stein as a visionary poet who, like himself, admired Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn. The young poets from the workshop would congregate at Stein’s house where they would discuss politics, literature, and travel. In memory, Stein’s house becomes a utopic site of origins, the lost home of his formative years. Maps of all kinds covered the walls generating a thirst for exploration and adventure. At that site, the narrator also remembers discovering the legendary story of Stein’s uncle. According to the poetry teacher, he was the most important Jewish general and communist war hero of World War II who died at the front lines at the age of thirty-nine. The narrator acknowledges that after discovering the story of Cherniakhovski his admiration for Stein became immeasurable and knew no bounds. With this detail, Bolaño reveals a clear-sighted awareness of how restorative nostalgia evades apprehension or attempts to eliminate it by recovering absolute truths that exist in roots and origins stories. Similar to the other authors and filmmakers in Unsettling Nostalgia, Bolaño uses photographs as nostalgia-producing objects that are also capable of producing uncertainty. In addition to the Cherniakhovski photo, the narrator recalls seeing in Stein’s home a picture of Dr. William Carlos Williams (1883–1963). The black and white image of the American poet, doctor, and socialist implicitly evokes the memory of another doctor and socialist: Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens. The photograph, usually considered what Marianne Hirsch calls “a simple transcription of the real” (Hirsch 1997, 7), takes on particular importance for the poetry group because it is an artifact from an earlier time that represents shared values, but that also kindles intrigue. In

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Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (1997), Hirsch makes the case that family photos shape personal and cultural memory and often solidify fictions: “Because the photograph gives the illusion of being a simple transcription of the real, a trace touched directly by the event it records, it has the effect of naturalizing cultural practices and of disguising their stereotyped and coded characteristics. As photography immobilizes the flow of family life into a series of snapshots, it perpetuates familial myths while seeming merely to record actual moments in family history” (Hirsch 1997, 7). In La voz dormida the photo of the spirited young revolutionary woman and child on the cover plays an essential role in the actual text. The antique image evokes a sense of nostalgia in the characters as well as the reader. By contrast, in Estrella distante, the photo of William Carlos Williams, as well as all of the pictures in the novel, does not function to offer an authentic historical snapshot. Instead, photos trigger the imagination, to provoke a measure of uncertainty about the concept of transparency, and to defamiliarize the reader so that we perceive ordinary objects or apparent historical facts anew. By interpreting Bolaño’s use of photographs as a mechanism to conjure and question memory, we gain an understanding of how nostalgia can be unsettling. The photo of William Carlos Williams becomes an artifact of scrutiny for all of the poets and raises questions about authenticity, interpretation, and the fabrication of lore. The characters ask, was it a montage constructed from several photographic images? Was it a man that looked like President Truman disguised as someone else, walking down the street in his home town, incognito? Through these humorous hypotheses, the narrator pokes fun at the process of idolization and invites readers to think about montage and the illusions of the portrait. Bolaño deconstructs what Hirsch calls the referential status that we assign to photos: “The illusion of the self’s wholeness and plentitude is perpetuated by the photographic medium as well as by the autobiographical act” (Hirsch 1997, 84). Bolaño’s reference to the picture of William Carlos William is a way to point to the process of concealment that characterizes the act of representation. The narrator sees the photographic image as mediated and constructed, fragmentary and incomplete. The text thus suggests that it might be “productive to see in the photograph an analogue of the process of the subject’s construction which occurs- as it does in autobiography- relationally in response to discursive practices” (Hirsch 1997, 84). In Estrella distante, the poets examine the photo, but their gaze is filtered through cultural, ideological, and emotional screens, which influence the image that they envision. This subjective and nostalgic process of viewing photographs is encapsulated in Stein’s admission that above all, he wants to believe that the photo of William Carlos Williams is authentic. This revealing comment should be read in relation to the blurry black and white newspaper photos of Wieder

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that the narrator uses to conclude that Wieder and Ruiz-Tagle are one. While the narrator self-consciously utilizes the images of Stein and William Carlos Williams as a means to stimulate hope and to put a heroic face on the utopian ideology in which he believed, he uses the image of Wieder as a means to put a face on the dominant ideology that he loathed. On the surface it is the creation of the most extreme contrast possible. But the narrator seems thoroughly aware that his characterization of Stein not only embellishes but also draws from dominant notions of normative masculinity. We should recall that he acknowledges that after discovering the war story of Stein's uncle (Cherniakhovski) his admiration for the poetry teacher became immeasurable and knew no bounds. Bolaño thus dramatizes the process by which heterosexual men construct gendered heroes and villains that become the protagonists of larger than life narratives that satisfy individual and collective fantasies. Particularly in times of crisis, courage is invoked in an effort to cultivate optimism, to counter political withdrawal, and to bolster unity through association with the esteemed paragon of virtue. That restorative nostalgic vision is challenged consistently in the novel through irony and metafiction. Time and distance alike contribute to the development of utopian memories of community, and conversely dystopian memories of rupture. Tracking down the elusive figure of the missing poetry teacher becomes a commitment, but also an antidote for the monotony and grief of inner and outer exile. In a quest for Stein, Bibiano (the narrator's friend who stayed in Chile) pieces together a maze of texts. In that process, he concludes that after leaving Chile, Stein had crossed into Nicaragua with the Sandinista troops. In their imagination, he morphs into an implacable figure who took on the epic proportions of a Hollywood hero. (Bolaño 2004, 60). But as the narrator admits, the very question of Stein’s identity becomes nebulous. Like Wieder, Stein is a ghost-like figure that appears in flashes at a distance. In a bar in Barcelona, the narrator identifies (or wants to identify) the face of Stein in a thin and ragged soldier-like professor in a documentary about the Sandinistas. This detail illustrates how Bolaño uses the voice of the narrator to question the various intertexts (videos, photos, newspaper articles). If the narrator claims to follow Stein’s trajectory, it is admittedly based on unreliable sources—an admission that challenges the heroic masculinist myth. Bolaño integrates these sources into the text not to confirm their legitimacy, but rather to interrogate them and to highlight the gendered nature of the legends of the left, and how they are generated and sustained through nostalgia. Readers also learn that it is possible that all of the information that Bibiano sends to the narrator about Stein and Wieder is an intricately woven fiction invented to add intrigue to his dull, solitary life under the dictatorship. If one key site of nostalgic origins is embodied in a stereotypical revolutionary archetype, then the figure of the performance artist named Lorenza allows the author to queer those roots. The narrative is situated midway

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through Estrella distante, notably at the novel’s center, and consists of a fivepage vignette that evokes the story of the real Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994). As Carl Fischer points out, Lorenza was a Chilean born German transgender performance artist whose life “defied geographical, gender, media, and canonical boundaries (Fischer 2016, 186). When she was born in 1959 in Punta Arenas, Chile, she was assigned “male” and named Ernst Böttner. At age nine, she had both arms amputated below the shoulder after an electrocution accident. Her family stayed in Chile until 1973 at which point they returned to Germany. Challenging the alienation of social exclusion that those deemed “disabled” were forced to endure, she learned how to paint and draw with her mouth and feet and graduated from the Kassel School of Art and Design. She changed her name to Lorenza, publicly embracing a transgender feminine identity, and rendered visible her armless body in photography and painting that refused to accept beauty norms. As Paul B. Preciado argues, “if medical discourse and modes of representation aim to desexualize and degender the impaired body, Lorenza’s performance work eroticized the trans-armless body, endowing it with sexual and political potency.” Lorenza placed her own image at the center of an extensive archive of photography, painting, drawing, video, and sculpture that she produced before dying of AIDS in 1994 at age thirty-five. Lorenza’s life story obliquely responds to questions regarding the regulatory sociopolitical framework of the Pinochet dictatorship to the extent that her unconventional art constitutes a creative disruption of the heteronormative, ableist, and masculinist ideologies of the Right that viewed any nonconforming gender as deviant. But her story also exposes how the marginalization of queer identities occurs across the political spectrum and within democratic and dictatorial regimes. Bolaño seems to recall Lorenza nostalgically as a figure that overturned normative views of identity that have also pervaded the left. Carl Fischer points out that Bolaño “invokes Lorenza in Estrella distante to counter previous, more exclusive post-dictatorship Chilean literary canons developed by an establishment in Chile that he considered vindictive and overly exclusive” (212). From a more critical perspective, Fischer questions Bolaño’s misgendering of Lorenza as “Lorenzo” and the author’s description of her as “a hopeless romantic and tortured artist, complete with a suicide attempt” (211). On the one hand, Bolaño’s narrative lacks nuance and reinserts heteronormative assumptions manifested in misgendering. On the other hand, the story of Lorenza allows Bolaño to queer utopic roots. The brief but evocative description of Lorenza closes with a telling remark. When the narrator thinks of Stein and Soto, he can’t help thinking of Lorenza too, and, at times, he considers her the best poet of the three (2004, 76). This final reflection problematizes heteromasculinist, cisgender, and ableist assumptions associated with nostalgic longing for heroic models. In a word, the inclusion of Lorenza’s story challenges the obvious

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exclusions of the conservative right-wing, but also tests prevailing accounts of resistance that pervade the gamut of political parties on the left. As Bolaño vindicates the memory of Lorenza, he also summons the memory of another queer artist, Pedro Lemebel, who inverted “not only rightist narratives of the nation that focused primarily on its heterosexual subjects, but also the hegemonic leftist narratives of a mourning to recuperate the memory solely of the politically oppressed” (Fischer 191). As I noted in this book’s introduction, Lemebel’s Tengo miedo torero (2001) depicts the challenges of a transgender woman (La loca del frente) in Pinochet’s Chile during the mid-1980s. One passage from that novel succinctly captures Lemebel’s critique of the invisibility of trans and queer people in the revolutionary struggles of the Left. As Queen contemplates leaving Chile, she knows that her sorrow will be ignored since “a fairy’s tears have no identification, no color, no taste; they have never watered any garden of illusions” (2003, 154). 8 Lemebel poignantly brings out the atrocities of the Right, but also the sexist, homophobic and transphobic betrayals of the left. 9 While Estrella distante only implicitly alludes to Lemebel, Bolaño’s vindication of his work is explicit in interviews and writings: “Lemebel doesn’t need to write poetry to be the best poet of my generation. No one goes deeper than Lemebel. And also, if that weren’t enough, Lemebel is brave. He understands how to open his eyes in the darkness, in those lands where no one dares to tread” (Bolaño 2011, 68). Bolaño goes on to say “he might be on the side of the losers but that victory, the sad victory offered by Literature (capitalized, as it is here), was surely his. When everyone who has treated him like dirt is lost in the cesspit or in nothingness, Pedro Lemebel will still be a star” (Bolaño 2011, 68). Bolaño’s reflection on Lemebel and Lorenza arguably stays on the surface, but in evoking their stories, he undermines the idealization of heteronormative masculinity that informs the nostalgic political imaginaries of both the Right and the Left. THE UNSETTLING TROPE OF DOUBLES The use of intertexts serves to question the authority of any single account while the use of the doppelganger, or the doubles trope, functions to complicate unbending Manichean political divisions. As Franklin Rodríguez argues in “Unsettledness and Doublings in Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante” (2010), multiple characters in the novel bring out the tensions between division and unity, victims and aggressors, destruction and construction. That tension, Rodríguez asserts, challenges rigid ideologies by suggesting that the self and the other are constructed from the same material (2010, 216). Rodríguez’s interpretation of Wieder as the demonic double of the narrator is convincing, but we can also trace unsettling parallels between Wieder and

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Stein. The legend of the poetry teacher involves a side story briefly detailing his connection to a group of pilots known as the “Flying Chileans.” This detail prompts readers to consider the similarities between masculinist constructions of left-wing heroes like Stein and right-wing figures like Wieder. While their political ideologies are opposed, both are thrill-seeking poets and pilots with a desire to search for new forms of literary expression that break with the past. Together, Stein and Wieder form a Janus-like figure represented with each face looking in opposite directions. These characterizations serve to underscore the convergences between masculinist, heteronormative, and ableist nostalgic discourses across the spectrum of dominant political ideologies. The narrator conjectures that Stein’s last revolutionary struggle was fought in El Salvador in 1989 with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). While he is never entirely sure, the narrator clings to the belief or fantasy that Stein was one of those fearless revolutionaries in San Salvador. Bibiano, who shares the narrator’s conviction that Stein was with the FMLN in their last attack, searches relentlessly for Stein’s family to inform them of his courageous acts and untimely death. To his regret, Stein’s former house was abandoned, and no surviving relatives were to be found. Bibiano locates a woman that knew the Stein family; however, she informs him that Stein was one of the “silent left,” not a militant. He was German, not Jewish, and had recently died of cancer. When Bibiano journeys to the cemetery, he is unable to find Stein’s grave. Ultimately, Bolaño deconstructs the myth of the heroic revolutionary male by questioning Stein’s entire trajectory and identity, leaving only one certainty; his mysterious disappearance days after the military coup. The narrator’s act of digging deep into the histories that he thought he knew reveals the potential of unsettling nostalgia. Wieder’s demise seems to contrast with Stein’s, but the author invites us to think about their uncomfortable intersections. The narrator speculates that after Wieder’s sky-writing celebrations of the coup, he was called upon to undertake a spectacular photo exhibit. As I noted earlier, Wieder's sky poetry included verses such as “La muerte es amistad” (Bolaño 2005, 90–91) [“Death is friendship”; Bolaño 2004, 80-81]. Based upon a self-denunciatory memoir published by a socalled Lieutenant Muñoz Cano, the narrator gathers that Wieder’s photo exhibit featured snapshots of the dismembered bodies of the regime’s female victims. In this grotesque photographic aestheticization of torture and misogyny, Muñoz Cano claims to have recognized the Garmendia sisters torn apart like mannequins in pieces. 10 With this narrative gesture, Bolaño unmasks the antifeminist underpinnings of militarized masculinity and the gendered nature of the glorification of violence and war. 11 It is striking that Muñoz Cano recalls something elegiac, melancholic, and nostalgic in the photo exhibit featuring the broken bodies of women. He wistfully recollects the atmosphere of camaraderie among the military men that the macabre display pro-

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duced. Bolaño uses the perspective of a former collaborator to explore a fascist nostalgia for kinship through a misogynist brotherhood in arms and the belief in bloodshed, and specifically the subjugation of politically active women, as means of national rejuvenation. From my perspective, the idea of the twin or double in Estrella distante does not denote a collapse of difference between the political ideologies and practices of the Left and the Right. It is not a mirror image but rather a refraction, or an obliquely reflected distorted image that haunts readers by stirring thought on the points of convergence and divergence. If the author critiques the masculinist and heteronormative nature of heroic narratives associated with the Left, he brings out the virulent misogynist cruelty of neofascist ideologies of the Right. As the Valech Report (aka Chile’s official torture report) reveals, sexualized brutality was systematically exercised by the military regime to elicit a confession, to punish, to humiliate and to ultimately eliminate the opposition (Stern, 2010, 290–92). Steve Stern points out that the data collection forms and interviews conducted by the Valech Commission “did not seek information about sexual violence. Nonetheless, almost all the women brought up the topic without prompting. . . . The sexual aggressions and violence included not only vaginal, oral, and anal rape, but also sexualized insults, simulations of rape and forced witness of it, stripping and groping, forced sex with prisoners and relatives, and penetration by trained dogs, rats, and insects” (Stern, 2010, 296). While the Valech Report broke new ground by recording gendered torture, the absence of the question in the forms and interviews points to a broader myopic view that fails to interrogate hierarchies of power and the relationship between gender and violence. In light of that glaring blind spot coupled with the Valech Report’s overdue publication in 2004, Bolaño’s depiction of Wieder in 1996 appears even more stunning. Estrella distante constitutes an illuminating forerunner that exposes ingrained misogynist ideologies that glorify male domination and normalize sexualized methods of control. Wieder’s grotesque photo display of dismembered women’s bodies is unsuccessful, not due to the sadistic misogyny in its making, but rather due to its unabashed exposure of cruelty and its potential to incriminate the perpetrators of the regime. At the same time, the photo exhibit’s aestheticization of misogynist sadism is frighteningly reminiscent of countless documented and undocumented murders cases outside the context of the dictatorship. The depiction of Wieder reminds readers of serial killers who have dismembered female victims and photographed their bodies. We recall the feminicide, sexual assault, and mutilation of hundreds of women and girls since the early 1990s in Ciudad Juárez, which Bolaño meticulously depicts in his massive final novel 2666. Published posthumously in 2004, the work ends Bolaño’s jarring investigation of misogyny initiated a decade earlier in Estrella distante. With the depiction of Wieder and his morbid photo display of anti-fascist women,

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Bolaño signals a continuum of violence in which the murder of a female body is considered the ultimate form of possession and the possession of a woman’s body is viewed as the ultimate form of power. The narrator’s subsequent search for Wieder allows the author to trace a transatlantic web of fascist, misogynist, and neo-nazi publications in Europe that link Chile, Spain, and Italy. He suspects Wieder’s participation in the production of hard-core pornography and his potential involvement in the unsolved murder of three actresses featured in the films. Through this detail, the author once again maps the histories of exploitation and degradation of women and illustrates the premise that violence is gendered. Bolaño unmasks sexualized violence as the bedrock of militaristic culture in which masculinity is defined in terms of dominance and aggression. Given the pervasiveness of such toxic masculinity beyond the barracks and clandestine torture centers, it is unsurprising that perpetrators like Wieder are treated with impunity. As the narrator recounts, his name appears in a judicial report (probably the 1991 Rettig Report) on the disappearance of political prisoners during the transition to democracy, but the case never progresses. The ongoing impunity that has benefitted the perpetrators is exemplified in the absence of the defendant (Wieder) in the trial involving the Garmendia twins. The Mapuche housekeeper who lived with them would testify at Weider’s trial in absentia. Bolaño undercuts nationalist narratives of stability and order by weaving into the story a silenced traumatic account within a larger framework of unaddressed mass atrocity crimes. In her memory, the night of the crime was one episode in a long history of killing and injustice. Her account of the events was swept up in a cyclical, epic poem, which, as her dumbfounded listeners came to realize, was partly her story, the story of the Chilean citizen Amalia Maluenda, who used to work for the Garmendias, and partly the story of the Chilean nation. A story of terror. When she spoke of Wieder, she seemed to be talking about several different people: an invader, a lover, a warrior, a demon. When she spoke of the Garmendia sisters, she likened them to the air, to garden plants or puppies.” (Bolaño 2004, 110–11) 12

This public expression of long-standing collective suffering renders visible the multiple and connected histories of imperialism and neo-imperialism shaped by misogyny, racism, and classism. It is no wonder, then, that the name Wieder in German means “again.” Against the backdrop of widespread impunity and through the words of a Mapuche woman, Bolaño elucidates how disillusionment in the present fuels nostalgic longing, in this case for a pre-colonial past symbolized through images of nature and a longing for the UP years personified by the Garmendia twins.

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EPIPHANIC NIGHTMARES, UNMAKING MYTHS Through the unsettling nostalgic mode, Bolaño not only overturns grand narratives but also the conventions of the detective novel insofar as the stated genre relies on the premise that the text incorporates important clues that ultimately trail the reader to the final revelation of truth. Around the time that Wieder is summoned for trial (1992), the narrator is sought out for clues by a private investigator named Abel Romero. Whereas a restorative nostalgic narrative might attempt to transmit an authoritative voice of truth and closure, Bolaño suggests that any narrative representation cannot offer more than an incomplete interpretation. The unsettling characterization of Romero contributes to this understanding of memory and representation. He is a mysterious character, formerly considered a celebrity on the police force during the Allende years, but the narrator’s description of the investigations that brought Romero fame, reveals another side, hinting that he extracted information through interrogation and torture. Again, Bolaño disallows readers to indulge themselves in the illusion of a paragon of heroism as Abel Romero seems to embody corruption and callous disregard for truth. The author’s unmistakable reversal of the Cain and Abel trope functions to further undermine established myths of good and evil. A dream of symbolic destruction signals a moment of sudden revelation for the narrator and brings the novel closer to an unsettling end. As the investigation intensifies, the narrator dreams of a yacht full of festive passengers. While he sits apart from the crowd as he writes a poem, a storm emerges and capsizes the boat, pushing the travelers to cling to the wreckage. The image is striking and reminiscent of the poem “The Yachts,” by the aforementioned poet William Carlos William published in 1935. The poem renders the rich as yachts competing in an ungoverned ocean while the working class is represented by the crew that crawls ant-like and is violently thrown from the ship. The narrator’s dream-turned-nightmare marks a watershed moment in Estrella distante and functions as an awakening for the narrator’s that brings to visibility his own sense of loss and regret. Adrift, the narrator sees Wieder in the dream and realizes that they had been traveling on the same boat: “he may have conspired to sink it, but I had done little or nothing to stop it going down” (Bolaño 2004, 121–22). This sentence bespeaks the tensions and remorse arising from inaction. His response is not to deny what he envisioned in his dream, but to confront how his evasion of responsibility had haunted him all along. As in the case of Últimos días de la historia, the narrator cannot ignore a profound sense of guilt for his lack of participation in the resistance against the military coup and the ensuing violence of the regime. As such, when he must identify Wieder for Romero, the outcome of that encounter is profoundly unsettling. For what he calls a “nauseating moment,” he sees himself in the

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image of Wieder “almost joined to him, like a vile Siamese twin” (Bolaño 2004, 144). The narrator interrogates his own trajectory and questions the ethics of revenge. In the final scene, Romero secretly murders the suspected man, but the full story remains beyond the reach of both the narrator and the reader. As Amelia Simpson suggests in her study of crime novels from Latin America: “The narrative technique of withholding in detective fiction conventionally promises eventual revelation” (1990, 161). However, Bolaño, like other Latin American detective novelists (i.e., Jorge Luis Borges, Leonardo Padura, Ricardo Piglia), subverts that convention. The enigma remains unresolved, leaving the reader to identify with the narrator’s feeling of doubt and dissatisfaction. This open-ended conclusion not only compels the reader to consider the impossibility of arriving at the indisputable truth, but it also encourages us to contemplate questions of justice and the possibility of a scenario in which an innocent man is condemned, and a guilty man remains free. AN UNFULFILLED LONGING The narrator’s reconstruction of the story of Wieder, Stein, Lorenza, and the Garmendia sisters is the story of something much larger. His search for these symbolic characters reveals a process of engaging with memories of the coup and the loss of utopian dreams. It is significant that when Romero locates the narrator in Blanes, he is living alone, in poor health and unable to make ends meet. He delves into literature’s dark corners in an attempt to unravel unsolved crimes, but he also allows himself the pleasure of immersing himself in positive Allende-era memories. Bolaño himself nostalgically wrote, “I remember the days after the coup as full days, crammed with energy, crammed with eroticism, days and nights in which anything could happen. . . . The experience of love, black humor, friendship, prison, and the threat of death were condensed into no more than five interminable months that I lived in a state of amazement and urgency” (2011, 53). Bolaño, like the narrator, is confronted with the perpetually incomplete task of piecing together a “distant” story from which he becomes removed both geographically and temporally. If the characters in Estrella distante are among the many disappeared whose remains will never be unearthed, how can Bolaño unearth their story? He dramatizes what Michael Lazzara calls the “tension between the desire to narrate the past and the difficulty of accessing that past” (Lazzara 2006, 150). Bolaño points to the inadequacies of his search, but he also highlights the failings of the justice system to deal with the effects of terror, structural misogyny, and the chronic and cumulative injustice rooted in a long history of genocide. But despite the threads of dark pessimism that zigzag through-

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out the novel, I agree with Lila McDowell Carlsen that “Bolaño is not apathetically anti-utopian; instead, he is an absurd critical utopian.” (McDowell Carlsen 2014, 150). By illustrating the sources, uses, and trappings of utopian thinking and nostalgic longing in a critically conscious way, Bolaño unites what many consider incompatible. Readers find a striking model of “unsettling nostalgia” that arises from a dual desire to piece together inspiring stories of resistance to galvanize the uninspired present and to simultaneously catalyze critique of the contradictions and shortcomings that have shaped revolutionary struggles. NOTES 1. For more on Bolaño’s biography, see the book of interviews titled Bolaño por sí mismo (2007) and The New Yorker article “Vagabonds: Roberto Bolaño and His Fractured Masterpiece” (March 2007) by Daniel Zalewski. 2. See Larry Rohter, “A Chilean Writer’s Fictions Might Include His Own Colorful Past,” New York Times, January 27, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28bola.html. 3. In the article “Unsettledness and Doublings in Roberto Bolañ o’s Estrella distante by in Revista Hispá nica Moderna (2010), Franklin Rodríguez offers an insightful interpretation of how the author unsettles readers. Whereas Rodríguez focuses on the uncanny and the potential of the double to create suspense and reflection, the main theme of this analysis is the unsettling potential of the nostalgic gaze. 4. “La mayoría de los que íbamos hablábamos mucho: no sólo de poesía, sino de política, de viajes (que por entonces ninguno imaginaba que iban a ser lo que después fueron), de pintura, de arquitectura, de fotografía, de revolución y lucha armada; lucha armada que nos iba a traer una nueva vida y una nueva época, pero que para la mayoría de nosotros era como un sueño o, más apropiadamente, como la llave que nos abrirá la puerta los sueños, los únicos por los cuales merecía la pena vivir” (Bolaño 2005, 13). 5. “Para mí, ser poeta era, al mismo tiempo, ser revolucionario y estar totalmente abierto a cualquier manifestación cultural, a cualquier expresión sexual, en fin, abierto a todo, a cualquier experiencia con drogas. La tolerancia era . . . más que tolerancia, palabra que no nos gustaba mucho, era hermandad universal, algo totalmente utópico” (Bolaño 2006, 38). 6. “Me sentí de pronto feliz, inmensamente feliz, capaz de hacer cualquier cosa, aunque sabía que en esos momentos todo aquello en lo que creía se hundía para siempre y mucha gente, entre ellos más de un amigo, estaba siendo perseguida y torturada. Pero ya tenía ganas de cantar y de bailar y las malas noticias (o las elucubraciones sobre malas noticias) sólo contribuían a echarle leña al fuego de mi alegría, si se me permite la expresión, cursi a más no poder (siútica hubiéramos dicho entonces), pero que expresa mi estado de ánimo e incluso me atrevería a afirmar que también el estado de ánimo de las Garmendia y el estado de ánimo de muchos que en septiembre de 1973 tenían veinte años o menos” (Bolaño 2005, 27–28). 7. “La historia de Juan Stein, el director de nuestro taller de literatura, es desmesurada como el Chile de aquellos años” (Bolaño 2005, 56). 8. “Porque las lágrimas de las locas no tenían identificación, ni color, ni sabor, ni regaban ningún jardín de ilusiones” (2001, 176). 9. Teaching Lemebel’s novel at the University of Oregon and later at Keene State College was very enriching. I am especially grateful to Jedidiah Crook who worked through this material with me during an independent study. 10. The image of the broken, dismembered mannequin-like bodies seems to parody the visual art of the neo-avant-garde artist Carlos Leppe who, as Idelber Avelar has observed, foregrounded the body of a transgender person in pieces. The goal of the photographic work, Avelar writes, was to “submit the body to segmentation, denaturalization, and resignification” (Avelar 1999, 167). But while some cultural critics praised the revolutionary quality of Leppe’s

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neo-avant-garde work, Bolaño problematizes its aesthetics by highlighting how a similar project could have appealed to supporters of the regime. 11. Franklin Rodríguez correctly points out that the photographic exhibition and aerial show function “as a clear intertextual reference to the violence, cruelty, glorification of war, militarization, and destructive gestures of the Italian Futurists” (Rodrí guez 2010, 212). 12. “La noche del crimen, en su memoria, se ha fundido a una larga historia de homicidios e injusticias. Su historia está hilada a través de un verso heroico (épos), cíclico, que quienes asombrados la escuchan entienden que en parte es su historia, la historia de la ciudadana Amalia Maluenda, antigua empleada de las Garmendia, y en parte la historia de Chile. Una historia de terror. Así, cuando habla de Wieder, el teniente parece ser muchas personas a la vez: un intruso, un enamorado, un guerrero, un demonio. Cuando habla de las hermanas Garmendia las compara con el aire, con las buenas plantas, con cachorros de perro” (Bolaño 2005, 120).

Conclusion Longing for Resistance

THE ELUSIVE MEMORY OF MICHELLE MARGUERITE PEÑ A HERREROS To illustrate the historical, affective, and thematic underpinnings of this book, I began with the story of Victor Pey in the prologue, and I now close with the story of Michelle Marguerite Peña Herreros whose photo adorns the cover of this book. It was during the same journey to Chile that I described in the introduction that I saw a photo of Michelle Peña hanging alongside other pictures at the center for the organization called the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Collective of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared). A friend who was on that journey with me, Alice MaCall, drew my attention to the large black and white photo of Peña fixed to the wall. As Gabriela Zúniga (former socialist militant and prominent member of the AFDD) discussed the challenges faced by families in the association who have been searching for justice as a collective since 1975, Peña’s striking profile loomed large. Curious to know her story, Alice suggested a search for information at the Vicaría de la Solidaridad, the archive containing photographs and testimonies of family members and survivors. After looking through files that recorded the identities of the disappeared, Alice found Michelle Marguerite Peña Herreros. She was born on July 27, 1947, and detained, tortured, and disappeared by the regime’s agents in June 1975 at the age of twenty-seven. She was eight months pregnant. Years after my trip with Alice to the archive, I returned to Peña Herreros’s story. What stood out to me was her family’s long-standing struggle, punctuated by multiple losses 187

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and transatlantic exile. It is a story that begins during the Spanish Civil War and tragically ends in Pinochet’s Chile. By piecing together information from the archive with accounts online, we can reconstruct an image, albeit hazy. She was the daughter of Gregoria Peña, who was born in Madrid around 1930. Along with other family members, all active members of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), Gregoria Peña crossed the Pyrenees in February 1939 to flee Franco’s forces at the end of the Spanish Civil War. Her father, who had fought on the Republican side, was taken as prisoner and detained in a concentration camp in France, most likely in the Roussillon Province, such as the Camp de concentration d’Argelès-sur-Mer between Perpignan and the border. Gregoria remained in Toulouse with her sister and parents for approximately a decade and gave birth in 1947 at age sixteen to Michelle. When Michelle was about five years old, Gregoria left for Chile with her daughter. Around 1952, they reunited with family who years earlier had escaped to Valparaíso on the ship called the Winnipeg, which I described in the introduction. Similar to the case of Victor Pey, the Peña family made a home in Chile thereafter. According to her mother, Michelle grew up surrounded by Spanish refugees, hearing the stories and songs of the Spanish Civil War and adopting the ideals conveyed in that atmosphere. 1 During the Popular Unity, Michelle studied electrical engineering at the Universidad Técnica del Estado and worked at the Institute of Social Studies in Latin America (INESAL). Among her acquaintances was Michelle Bachelet, the future president of Chile after the dictatorship. Following the 1973 coup, Michelle Peña risked her life to work in underground networks to support the Socialist Party in hiding. In September 1974, the secret police had intensified their search for her and invaded her mother’s home. When they did not find Michelle, they kept Gregoria Peña under surveillance. On June 20, 1975, Michelle was arrested by the DINA with her partner Ricardo Lagos Salinas in La Villa Japón in the neighborhood of Las Rejas. They were both interrogated and tortured in the covert detention center Villa Grimaldi. Today, Michelle Peña’s whereabouts are unknown, as well as the fate of her unborn child. Some key witnesses, including Luz Arce, confirmed in their testimonies to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Michelle Peña Herreros was detained and tortured at Villa Grimaldi. The former leader of the MIR, Gladys Díaz Armijo, also confirms seeing Peña at Villa Grimaldi in June of 1975. Others also suggest that Peña gave birth to a baby at the Military Hospital (Hosmil), but there is no further information regarding her child (Arce 2004, 248). 2 It is believed that Peña’s body was thrown into the sea near San Antonio in 1975. 3 Her case has been archived in the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. Gregoria Peña, Michelle’s mother, filed an official complaint in 1978, but the charge has not resulted in any formal indictments. 4

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Peña’s story, which cannot be captured in these pages, is the kind of story that perturbs, but it also stimulates the imagination and provides a source of inspiration for authors and filmmakers. We are reminded of the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of the Garmendia sisters whose ghosts haunt Roberto Bolaño’s Estrella distante. We also recall the aspirations and nightmares involving the life and death of Teresa González Puerto who spent her last days in a Francoist prison in Almudena Grandes’s El corazón helado. Grandes and Bolaño offer examples of how to depict the untold stories of women and other marginalized voices who challenged power hierarchies, and at the same time offer what Michael Lazzara calls a “reflection on the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of accessing and narrating the past” (Lazzara 2006, 135). It is the combination of careful contextualization and the recognition of the leaps and breaks in the process of recall that make their nostalgic representations so compelling, meaningful, and instructive. VISIBILITY AND INVISIBILITY While Michelle Peña’s story of transatlantic ideological struggle is largely unknown, her portrait has been used by some as a symbol of resistance against the regime’s brutality. Only days after our trip to the archive, Alice and I saw her image again, this time in a multimedia performance called Cuerpo quebrado (Broken Body). Directed by Natalia Cuéllar and performed in Santiago in 2008, the production was meant to pay homage to three pregnant political prisoners detained and tortured by the regime’s secret police: Michelle Peña, Cecilia Labrín, and Reinalda Pereira. The performance dramatizes an interrogation, electrocution, and drowning of the three women. Influenced by the Butoh form, the performance does not have any dialogue, and the sound is reduced to a disturbing baroque musical score. The ethereal noise of sloshing water alludes to the “death flights” to which the women detainees and their fetuses in utero were subject. The spectral images and the interchanging red, blue and green lights projected on the stage, combined with the absence of dialogue, transmit the ghostly presence of the disappeared political prisoners and the limitations of language to convey the damage of state terror. Three years after the production of Broken Body, documentarian Rodrigo Díaz directed a film about Michelle Peña titled Michelle (2011). In contrast to the performance, the documentary not only foregrounds Peña’s detainment, but also a panorama of political activism involving Michelle’s entire family. Early in the film, Michelle’s aunt Maru focuses on her sister Gregoria (Michelle’s mother) and her experience as a young single mother living in postwar France as a Spanish Republican refugee. The filmmaker combines

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archival photos of Michelle as a child with her aunt’s commentary to give viewers a window into the development of her character and values. By reaching back to a time before the Pinochet dictatorship and by emphasizing the intersectional nature of identities, the filmmaker allows us to imagine a fuller portrait of one of the regime’s victims and to comprehend the competing forces and ideologies predating and surrounding Michelle’s arrest. The film also highlights the political repression of Spanish Republican exiles in Chile during the 1950s under Carlos Ibáñez del Campo thereby upending the notion that the 1973 coup was an aberration. The film thus shares the concerns that Diana Taylor explains in the article “Trauma as Durational Performance” in Rites of Return. Taylor persuasively argues that we must bear witness not only to the personal loss, but to “a system of power relations hierarchies, and values that not only allowed but required the destruction of others (277). In considering the differences between these two artistic representations of Michelle Peña’s story, I am also reminded of Taylor’s argument that “Memory is a tool and a political project—an honoring of those who are gone and a reminder to those who will listen that the victimizers have gotten away with murder. . . . If we focus only on the trauma we risk evacuating the politics.” (277). To the extent that the performance Broken Body seeks to render visible the gendered character of state torture, it constitutes a thoughtprovoking form of memorialization and a valuable contribution to ongoing debates in Chile on the irreparable damage inflicted on women prisoners by the military regime. Furthermore, the performance involves non-conventional methods that capture the audience without commentary. However, if the performance also seeks to combat the erasure of women’s political histories, then it falls short as the piece is worrisomely devoid of a contextualized rendering of struggle. The documentary Michelle takes a more traditional approach to storytelling and, as a result, it lacks the experimental appeal that Broken Body achieves. The film is a more nostalgic work, but offers the kind of contextualization that allows viewers to go beyond the image of the tortured figure. Spectators of Broken Body, on the other hand, are left to assume Peña’s political affiliations, social values, and identity. Cuéllar’s attentiveness to the victims’ corporeal pain and the perpetrators’ sadism overrides insights into the context in which such violence was produced. Peña’s cultural and political genealogy has the potential to illuminate the relationship between Chilean and Spanish collectivities and the dual military apparatuses that aimed to systematically eliminate them. The film Michelle sheds light on the ways in which her incredible story transcends national borders and underscores the continuities between political contexts, while the performance Broken Body inadvertently reduces the image of Peña to a suffering pregnant body in detainment.

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In some ways, the performance illustrates the problematic appeal of gendered symbols and feminized icons in anti-dictatorial memorial reconstructions. Broken Body bespeaks a yearning for a revolutionary mother and her stolen or aborted progeny, seen as irreversibly effaced from history. It allows us to consider common rhetorical strategies (emotional appeals to suffering), themes (rupture, discontinuity), and gendered motifs (maternal sacrifice) that run through both left-wing and right-wing political discourses and for contrasting goals. Given its intersections with gender, revolution, and masculinist violence, Peña’s story powerfully dialogues with the Spanish story of the real Trece Rosas and its fictionalization in the novel La voz dormida. As this book discusses, Las Trece Rosas is the iconic name of a group of thirteen young women of the Unified Socialist Youth (JSU) who were executed by a Francoist firing squad after their detention and coercive interrogation in the Ventas Prison in Madrid. In her book Fearless Women, Tabea Alexa Lindhard uses the example of the Trece Rosas to address “the conflicts and contradictions that participation in revolutions and wars entails for women” (28). She maintains that the symbol of idealized femininity and youth, epitomized by the rose, displaces these women’s real experiences of marginalization. These examples suggest that simple “restorative” nostalgia traverses the political spectrum from Right to Left. These findings have important implications for the broader field of nostalgia and post-dictatorial thought to the extent that they challenge categorical assumptions about the commemoration of the regime’s victims. COMPARING NOSTALGIAS In her book The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia and Memory, cultural critic Susannah Radstone argues, Criticism of contemporary nostalgia remains vague concerning questions of universalism versus historical specificity and homogeneity versus heterogeneity. In the main, contemporary nostalgia criticism posits nostalgia as a feature of postmodernism, while avoiding discussions of genealogy and history. Absent too from discussions of contemporary nostalgia culture are any comparative studies of different contemporary nostalgias: questions concerning differences of form, genre and medium remain largely unexplored. (Radstone 2007, 130)

Through close readings of nostalgic Spanish and Chilean novels and films, I have sought to distinguish between different types of nostalgia and address “the emergence, meanings, significance and appeal of [nostalgia’s] varied practices and representations” to which Radstone refers (Radstone 2007, 129). In Unsettling Nostalgia, we have seen how authors and filmmakers

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have engaged contentious memories about conflict, exile, incarceration, and torture in the context of the military dictatorships. In different ways, they mourn the political defeat of the regimes’ opponents and uphold their discourses that were either distorted or occluded in the public sphere. The parallels between nostalgic modes and affective registers in cultural production that respond to and “resist” the hijacking of the Second Republic and Popular Unity is precisely what makes this comparison resonant. We trace an evocative continuity between Spain and Chile that goes even beyond the topic of authoritarianism and its corresponding policies of political and cultural repression. In the case of La voz dormida, Dulce Chacón draws from oral testimonies, diaries, national government records, and other documentary resources to reconstruct a constellation of memories of Republican women who suffered in Francoist prisons during the postwar years. Chacón seeks to be the mouthpiece of ex-political prisoners who fought to survive in hopes that one day they would publicly expose the state crimes committed against them and also to continue the struggle for social change. But, as I have argued, the author’s sentimental portrait of Republican groups as flawless communities, as well as her eagerness to create an unambiguous representation of truth, characterizes her novel, to some degree, as the type of reductive nostalgia that Fredric Jameson criticizes in the essay “Nostalgia for the Present” (2006). In La voz dormida, Chacón seeks to recycle the style and atmosphere of postwar Spain and to bring together traumatic memories of prison experiences into a narrative that ultimately silences incongruities and contradictions. The result is the erosion of historical complexity and the elimination of nuances of subjectivity. It seems paradoxical that the author critiques a dualistic narrative of the war while supplanting it with her own narrowly construed plot. What is more, it could be argued that the novel creates the illusion that readers are recuperating what they have lost. In Últimos días de la historia, the narrator sustains a nostalgic longing through the memories of the cultural and political milieu that the Pinochet regime sought to eradicate. Brodsky vindicates the struggles of the regime’s opponents of various political stripes, and at the same time, he stresses the impossibility of the task of “working through” traumatic memories of state violence. The narrator is a melancholic character struggling with the intractable loss of family, friends, and the political ideals that he had invested in the Popular Unity. However, unlike the archetypal melancholic subject who cannot pinpoint the source of pain, Brodsky’s protagonist is mindful of the origin of his suffering and attempts to confront it through an artistic performance of memory. If melancholia is the internalization of the lost object, then in the protagonist’s public performance residues of loss are exploded out of the body/machine. However, the damage remains or lingers, and the “acting out” continues. No matter how much he tries to work through his

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despair, the protagonist’s attempt is never enough, mainly due to his awareness of the profound authoritarian legacies that continue to haunt Chileans in the aftermath of the dictatorship. Brodsky’s nostalgia offers a critical interrogation of the contemporary governmental and societal move in Chile towards reconciliation, resolution, and closure. This approach to memory and nostalgia might find its echo in the tactics of the FUNA (meaning “to unmask”) movement. This memory community is made up of victims, families, and activists seeking to confront violators and the apathetic or complicit public that oppose the imprisonment of perpetrators. The FUNA movement advocates the commemorative and ideological procedures surrounding the locating, identification, and reburial of the disappeared. In Salt in the Sand (2007), Lessie Jo Frazier offers a brief description of this organization’s project: Exemplifying cathartic memory were the funa (slang for denouncing or public outing) protests that began in the late 1990s and were modeled on an Argentine form of protest in which documented torturers who were not formally tried were “outed” by protestors who marched to their neighborhoods and workplaces to plaster notices and hold demonstrations detailing their crimes. . . . The state declared them illegal as a form of vigilante justice; activists in turn pointed to the failure of the state to widely prosecute these crimes. (Frazier 2007, 345)

Frazier points out that one of the key critiques of the movement was its “portrayal of perpetrators as monsters who should have no place in civil society” which “obscured the ways in which civil society was and still is implicated in political persecution and injustice” (Frazier 2007, 345). In this regard, Brodsky’s novel, as well as Bolaño’s and Grandes’s, broadens the work of the protestors insofar as they painstakingly underscore civil society’s silent complicity in dictatorial repression. Their form of unsettling nostalgia provokes further debate about the dangers of forgetting the systematic violence of the military regimes while it also questions the current neoliberal political-economic model that the regimes implemented and violently defended. Also compelling is the comparison between Grandes, Chacón, Castillo, and Astudillo since it allows us to observe various acts of transgenerational communication of memory between mothers and their children. Through real and fictionalized protagonists, we witness a range of responses to dictatorial traumas and the differences between the first, second, and third generations, as well as the tensions within each of these. In the case of El corazón helado, the first-person narrator attempts to understand his own families’ political affiliations and motivations and in doing so comes to identify with his distant Republican grandmother while severing ties with his siblings and parents. In some ways, Álvaro frustrates generational logic as he is in-between the sec-

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ond and third generations. It was his grandmother who experienced the Civil War as an adult and was violently “disciplined” for her identification with the Republican side. Interestingly, her son Julio (Alvaro’s father) is also part of the first generation since he experienced the war as an adolescent, but identity positions (age, gender, politics) make his war experience contrast with his mother’s. Through these characters and the blurry political and generational divides that they traverse, the novel complicates simplistic approaches to generational logic, and it also problematizes the facile binary logic of the two Spains. Intergenerational exchanges between characters allow Grandes to look sharply at the post-Franco present and reflect upon both the victims of Francoist repression and the beneficiaries of the dictatorship. By bringing Álvaro into dialogue with Raquel, a character not fully explored in Unsettling Nostalgia, Grandes widens and deepens her scope. Raquel can be positioned within the third generation since it was her grandparents who fought in the Civil War on the Republican side while her parents were born after the war in exile. Unlike her mother and father who became saturated with stories of the Civil War, Raquel finds in her grandfather’s account a meaningful narrative with which she chooses to identify. In her journey to redress the economic and social injustices committed against her family within the context of ongoing impunity in the post-Franco democracy, it is the combination of nostalgia and melancholy imbuing her grandfather’s war stories that fuels Raquel’s move forward. This character, like her grandfather Ignacio, is rendered with fine brush strokes and comes to embody the critical consciousness and historical awareness that the novel upholds. The author reclaims marginalized histories by exploring the perspectives of vanquished Republicans, but also by moving beyond the privileged male heterosexual vantage point of the central character Álvaro. Raquel might find her counterpart in the fictional character Tensi in La voz dormida and the real Macarena Aguiló in Calle Santa Fe. For these daughters and granddaughters of the victims, salvaging the stories of their ancestors and identifying with them is a shared commitment. By analyzing these novels and films together, we not only gain a better understanding of how nostalgic representation might either flatten or conversely expand our perception of the past and its relationship to the construction of contemporary identities, but also how nostalgia is felt in the body. While this book only explores this area to a certain extent, it points to a number of ways in which literature and film portray nostalgia as an embodied experience triggered by smells, sights, and sounds. Aspects of the characters’ bodies beyond the brain play a significant and physically constitutive role in cognitive processing. For instance, the explicit allusion to the Thirteen Roses in La voz dormida by Dulce Chacón is one of the most powerful examples of how nostalgia is embodied on both the intradiegetic and extrad-

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iegetic levels of the novel. Inside the world described to the reader, the figurine from Joaquina’s belt is not only a symbol of a heroine for Tomasa, but also a material relic that triggers her memory as she caresses it. Readers witness how nostalgia is embodied through tactile experience and becomes a means to connect with lost loved ones while coping with ongoing physical and mental suffering. On the extradiegetic (outside) level, Chacón uses the acknowledgments to convey her gratitude for the experience of seeing first hand Julia Conesa’s original letters written from the Ventas prison where she was executed. If we consider Chacón’s treatment of objects that enkindle nostalgia within the comparative framework of this study, we notice important similarities and differences. While letters and photographs become potent objects that stimulate nostalgia in all of the works analyzed in Unsettling Nostalgia, the active critical engagement with that nostalgic experience varies greatly. As noted, reading Estrella distante alongside La voz dormida brings out the greatest contrast between nostalgias since Bolaño’s use of photos in the novel does not function to offer an authentic historical snapshot, but rather to trigger the imagination and to provoke a measure of uncertainty. There is no trace of restorative nostalgia that is not cross-examined through irony and parody. This discussion challenges the notion that nostalgia is entirely uncomplicated, uniform, and incapable of co-existing with critical consciousness and historical inquiry. THE FUTURE OF UNSETTLING NOSTALGIA A comparison of the interrelated yet under-examined twentieth-century histories of Spain and Chile generates insights about the role of nostalgia in the ongoing process of memory and identity formation. Overturning negative assumptions about nostalgia, this study offers examples of the kind of nostalgia that Jameson vindicated in his essay “Walter Benjamin, or Nostalgia.” He writes “But if nostalgia as a political motivation is most frequently associated with fascism, there is no reason why nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other” (1969, 68). The works in Unsettling Nostalgia allow us to theorize the diverse varieties of nostalgia as well as the meaning of nostalgia’s allure. Through narrative strategies such as metafiction and irony or self-conscious melancholic registers, unsettling nostalgic novels and films and their multiple hybrid variants, not only generate thought-provoking critiques of the military regimes, but also of the uncritical modes of nostalgic memory that unwittingly ignore the analytical challenges that memories propose. My analysis illustrates how nostalgic narratives might overcome narrow formulations of the victims to prompt a critically-conscious response to the lingering sense

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of loss in the aftermath of state violence. It also shows that nostalgia bespeaks a desire to draw from histories of resistance to engender deeper visions of justice today. It is my hope that by redefining nostalgia and casting light on its political and social relevance, Unsettling Nostalgia helps to move post-dictatorial memory studies in new directions. Indeed, there are many areas where work needs to be done to better understand the process and meaning of nostalgic memorialization after dictatorial atrocity. This book situates nostalgia at the intersection between identity, narrative fiction, and documentary film. Still to be written are explorations of the relationship between post-dictatorial nostalgia and representation in museums, television series, fiction film, and the graphic novel. Why have these areas boomed in recent years? How might these genres aestheticize nostalgia, and what is the effect? Might their nostalgic scripts support or question stereotypical modes of identification? Another area in need of further analysis is the conservative Franco-era domestic nostalgia conveyed in magazines and school textbooks. How did these texts use a reactionary nostalgia to reinforce gender norms and to delegitimize the reforms of the Second Republic? What similarities might we find in the case of Pinochet's Chile? Apart from the question of genre, we might consider several issues that deserve more considerable attention, like the relationship between nostalgia and the representation of non-heteronormative bonds in the context of pre-dictatorial social movements and clandestine resistance. Although the scope of this book is modest, it lays a foundation for unexplored horizons. These chapters frame nostalgia as an emotional response to the cultural transformations that were violently forged and solidified through militarized authoritarianism in Spain and Chile. Nostalgic narratives become a tool to create an ethical distance from them. If we push the discussion around nostalgia in different directions, we see a combination of nostalgic impulses that contribute to the process of redress and catalyze commitments to human rights and solidarity. By giving detail and dimension to lives flattened in history, the authors and filmmakers in this book reveal a new paradigm that contributes to current notions of belonging and identity. They show that the process of return to sites and memories can spur pain and a sense of loss, but it can also ignite transformation and connection. NOTES 1. Note that this testimony is recorded in the Chilean Socialist Party Archives. 2. Luz Arce, 2004, The Inferno: A Story of Terror and Survival in Chile, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. 3. See Archivo de Fondos y Colecciones: Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos 4. See also http://www.memoriaviva.com/English/victims/pena-herreros.htm.

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Index

absence, 110 accountability, 78 action, 16 Actos melancólicos (Gundermann), 15 Aguiló, Macarena, 80, 93; interview with, 91 Aguirre Cerda, Pedro, 3 Alarcón, Rolando, 30 Allende, Isabel, 37 Allende, Salvador, 1, 23, 65 allusion, 83; to Lemebel, 47; metaphor and, 72; narratives and, 103 Almonacid Zapata, Fabián, 3 American Graffiti film, 13 anarchists, 3 anti-fascism, 17 anti-nostalgia, 36, 41 anxiety, 88 Arce, Luz, 87 archives, 97–116; archival footage, 80; information from, 188 ARMH. See Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory articles, 14, 94n3, 120; by Herrmann, 20; by Zatlin, 139–140 Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory (ARMH), 32 Astudillo, Carolina, 48, 98, 116n1 atrocities, 101, 135; confrontation of, 42 audience, 62, 115 automatons, 72

Avelar, Idelber, 85 awareness, 94 Aylwin, Patricio, 35 Aznar, José Maria, 32 Bachelet, Michelle, 1, 33, 35; GAM and, 66 Bachelet Martínez, Alberto, 33 Balmes, José, 29, 52n7 beliefs, 59, 90 belonging, 34 Benet, Juan, 19; Nunca llegarás a nada by, 71 Benjamin, Walter, 13, 57, 62 Betancourt, Renard, 93 Bolaño, Roberto, 50, 185n1; Estrella distante by, 166; translations of, 51 Boler, Megan, 22 Borrás, Enriqueta, 110, 111 Boym, Svetlana, 9, 12, 21; on restorative nostalgia, 68, 83; on utopia, 11 Brodsky, Roberto, 44 Bru i Llop, Roser, 29 buildings, 66 Bunk, Brian, 127 burial, 2 Buscando a Allende documentary, 2 Bush, George W., 32

211

212

Index

Calle Santa Fe documentary, 47–48; by Castillo, 79, 80; longing for resistance in, 81–86 Camus, Albert, 61 Canela, Libertad, 108–110 Cánovas, Isabel, 111 capitalism, 65; neoliberalism capitalism, 5; opportunism and, 148 Cárcel de Mujeres (Cuevas), 118–119, 126 La casa de los espíritus (Allende, I.), 37 Casas, Francisco, 61 case studies, 8 Castillo, Carmen, 43, 47, 93; Calle Santa Fe film by, 79, 80; in exile, 81; Marchi and, 89; photographs and, 83; in voiceover, 82–83 Catalonia, 48, 52n7 Cernuda, Luis, 28–29 Chacón, Dulce, 44, 110; interviews by, 119; La voz dormida by, 49, 117–136 characterizations, 119, 149, 161 children, 87, 152; adult children, 102; childhood memories, 50, 156–162; daughters of MIR, 90–91; of survivors, 116 Chile, 56, 58, 175; comparison between Spain and, 16–20; Law of Historical Memory, 33, 35, 122; Pinochet and, 22–27 Chilean Popular Unity government (19701973), 6, 98; portrayals of, 17 Chilenas en armas (Zalaquett), 78 cinematography, 81, 82 Cities in Ruins (Enjuto Rangel), 29 Civil Obedience: Complicity and Complacency in Chile since Pinochet (Lazzara), 26 El Clarin newspaper, 3–4 class status, 146; sexism and, 149 CNT. See Confederación Nacional del Trabajo collective devastation, 69 collective experience, 60 collective responsibility, 50 collective trauma, 14 commemoration, 31 communes, 90 communism, 26 compassion, 112

compulsive reenactment, 88 conceptualization, 15; of haunting, 41; of nostalgia, 11–51; of postmemory, 39; of unsettling nostalgia, 23 the Concertación government, 54, 55 Conejeros, Francisca, 108–110 Conesa, Julia, 130 Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), 3 connection, 123–135 conservative nostalgia, 27 conspiracies, 171–174 context, 58, 88, 147; contemporary nostalgia, 31; dictatorship as, 71; of oppression, 124; relationship in, 91; of violence, 190 control, 131, 146; of organizations, 77–78 El corazón helado (Grandes), 49 Les Corts Women’s Prison, 108; history, 114 coups, 19, 25, 166; anniversary of, 38; footage after the, 80 courage, 123–135 Courier font, 106 Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain (Martín Gaite), 24, 104 creative reenactment, 88 critical consciousness, 67; memory and, 22; nostalgic remembrance and, 153 Cuba, 87, 88, 90 Cuevas, Tomasa, 118–119, 126 cultural beliefs, 59 cultural continuity, 7 cultural imagination, 45, 46 cultural minorities, 77 cultural production, 5; gender and, 79; nostalgia and, 31 cultural survival, 116 culture of memory, 92 Davis, Fred, 12 death, 18; of Franco, 26; of martyrs, 130–131; of Pey, 4 dehumanization, 44 democracy, 73 De monstruos y faldas documentary, 48, 97–116; unsettling nostalgia in, 106–113 derailment, 88

Index desencanto, 34 desire, 34, 60; objects and, 147; politics and, 56 dichotomies, 56 dictatorships: context of, 71; representations of, 121. See also specific dictatorships Dinges, John, 4 “Díptico español” (Cernuda), 28–29 disappearance, 189 discontinuity, 70 discourses, 55, 121; homophobia and, 61; nostalgic discourses, 19; restorative nostalgia in, 70; weapon of, 23 diseases, 124 disenchantment, 55, 84; generations and, 58; nostalgia and, 34–36; in Spain, 37 disenfranchisement, 77 dislocation, 91 displaced nostalgia, 5 disruption, 42 dissidence, 92 documentary, 21, 82, 99; by Castillo, 47; nostalgia and, 80–81; Spain and, 97 The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (Smaill), 21 dual longing, 97 Duchesne Winter, Juan, 78, 94n2 Durruti Column, 3 education, 43–44 elections, 3, 84; participation in, 53 Eltit, Diamela, 73 emotion, 89; landscapes of, 94; literature and, 136; nostalgia and, 7 empathy, 92 The End of History and the Last Man (Fukuyama), 64 Enloe, Cynthia, 112 Enríquez, Miguel, 43, 80, 115 equality, 7, 127, 134; contempt for, 146; demand for, 60; gender equality, 21 escapism, 56–57 essays, 139; by Graham, 104–105; by Jameson, 14 Estrella distante (Bolaño), 50, 166 ethics, 91, 150; dilemmas and, 92; ethical subjectivity, 133 euphemisms, 102

213

events, 59; catastrophe of, 69, 119 executions, 114; testimony about, 130 exile, 80, 145; Castillo in, 81; in France, 103, 108, 144; internal exile, 31; Lazzara on, 69; nostalgia and, 27–29 experiences, 60; of audience, 115; collective devastation as, 69; as firsthand, 5–6; of Grandes, 140; identity and, 65; Jameson on, 99; narratives of, 19; postmemory and, 132; of women, 101 exploration, 55, 145 exposure, 5 families, 143, 146; kinship and, 156; representations of, 153 Family Frames (Hirsch), 99, 132, 162 Fatherland and Liberty (Patria y Libertad), 27 female subjectivity, 89 feminist perspective, 14, 22; as transatlantic, 19; women’s movements and, 35 fiction, 36–39 film: guerrillas in, 45; nostalgia mapping and, 36–39 Fischer, Carl, 42 forgetting, 73–74 FPMR. See Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez; Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front France, 103, 108; exile communities in, 144 Franco, Francisco, 16; death of, 26; speeches by, 24 Francoist regime (1939-1975), 2, 6, 118; women and, 128 Frazier, Lessie Jo, 60; on reconciliation, 73 Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez (FPMR), 77 Fukuyama, Francis, 64 future, 73–74 The Future of Nostalgia (Boym), 12 Gabriela Mistral Metropolitan Cultural Center (GAM), 65; Bachelet, Michelle and, 66 game, 109 Garcés, Joan, 4, 32

214

Index

García, Antoñita, 130 Garzón, Baltasar, 4, 32 gaze, 116 Gazzara, Ben, 68 gender, 92; cultural production and, 79; gendered violence, 104–105; gender equality, 21; nostalgia and, 20–22, 77–94; symbolism and, 101 gender norms, 7, 78, 151; challenge to, 121; oppression and, 102 Generalitat de Catalunya, 111 generations, 58, 140; disenchantment and, 58; multigenerational population, 17; postmemory and, 99 genres, 8, 20–22; horror films as, 40; memory and, 21 Gen X, 5 Glazer, Peter, 133 government, 33 Graham, Helen, 135; essay by, 104–105 Grandes, Almudena, 28, 44; experience of, 140; Léon and, 145; novels by, 49, 136 El gran vuelo film, 103 Greek, 83; mythology, 61 Gualleros, Maricarmen, 111, 113 La guerra persistente: Memoria, violencia y utopia (López Quiñones), 37; utopia and, 119, 137n1 guerrilla fighters, 45 La guerrilla narrada (Duchesne Winter), 78 Guevara, Che, 12 guilt, 151; survivors and, 71 Gundermann, Christian, 15 Guzmán, Jaime, 26 Guzmán, Patricio, 85 Haas, Liesl, 35 hagiography, 67, 126 harm, 91 haunting, 59; trauma and, 39–41 hegemony, 14–15; alternatives to, 65 Herman, Judith, 69 heroism, 68, 112, 127; characterizations and, 119; false heroism, 71; heroines and, 135; narrative and, 155; photographs and, 174–179 Herrmann, Gina, 20, 77, 86 heterosexuality, 154

historical awakening, 58–63 historical moments, 56 history, 6, 7, 140; Les Corts Women’s Prison, 114; literary histories, 19; women in, 118 Hite, Katherine, 34, 65; on Pinochet, 38; When Romance ended by, 53 Hodgin, Nick, 15 homogeneous memory, 8 homophobia, 61 homosexuality, 60 hoop rolling, 109 Hopenhayn, Martín, 36, 54, 75n3 Horowitz, Sara, 46 human rights, 54; accountability and, 78; violations, 8 Hutton, Patrick, 13 Huyssen, Andreas, 36, 40; on palimpsests, 115 hybridity, 82 hymns, 30 hypocrisy, 70 idealization, 41; nostalgia and, 122; of past, 82 ideals, 113; of womanhood, 118 identity, 64, 109, 153, 155; continuity of, 125, 131–132; experiences and, 65; intersectionality and, 14, 155–156; memory and, 9, 63; power and, 147; reclamation of, 122 ideology, 21, 27, 156; centrality of, 35; enforcement of, 104; media and, 112; misogyny and, 105; response to, 106; shift in, 18; struggle between, 64 Ilie, Paul, 139 imagery, 40, 101, 127; repetition of, 107; womanhood and, 104, 108 The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Lowenthal), 12 imperialism, 114, 182 impunity, 54 inaction, 71 individualism, 55 El infierno (Arce), 87 influence, 63, 100 inner exile, 139–163 institutions, 105 internal exile, 31

Index

215

interpretations, 46; of resistance, 149 intersectionality, 51n1, 122, 191; identity and, 14, 155–156 interviews, 55; with Aguiló, 91; by Chacón, 119; Marchi in, 87–88 invisibility, 154, 189–191 ironic nostalgia, 165–185 irruption, 38 la Izquierda Unida, 143

resistance and, 1–9, 69–73, 81–86; unfulfillment of, 184–185 Lopate, Phillip, 82 López Quiñones, Antonio, 37, 52n10, 137n1 loss, 74, 84 Loureiro, Ángel, 39 Lowenthal, David, 12 Lumpérica (Eltit), 73

Jameson, Fredric, 13, 39, 74; essays by, 14; on experience, 99 Jelin, Elizabeth, 81, 127, 133 Jewish community, 120 Johns, Alessa, 44 JSU. See Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas Juan Carlos (King), 26 Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Unified Socialist Youth) (JSU), 42, 146, 150

Macdonald, Sharon, 129 Machado, Antonio, 30 Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), 45 mapping, 36–39 Marchi, Margarita, 80; Castillo and, 89; interview with, 87–88 The Mares of the Apocalypse (Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis) group, 61 marginalization, 7, 155 Martín, José, 82 Martín Gaite, Carmen, 24; Courtship Customs in Postwar Spain by, 104 martyrs, 24, 127; death of, 130–131 Marx, Karl, 13 Marxism, 72 masculinity, 146, 149 Masiello, Francine, 36 Mateu, Rosa, 110 Meacham, J. A., 126 meaning, 79, 93, 165; disruptive, 116; sanctuary of, 125 media, 12; ideology and, 112; power and, 106; representations in, 24–25. See also specific types of media memoir, 80, 145 memorials, 94 memory, 15, 67, 92; childhood and, 50, 156–162; critical consciousness and, 22; dislocation and, 91; of dissent, 152; excavation of, 7; gaps in, 18; genres and, 21; homogeneous memory, 8; identity and, 9, 63; incongruities of, 81; lack of, 136; modes of, 41–42; motivation and, 167–169; nostalgia and, 20; nostalgic memory, 19, 124, 141–143; novels of, 144; persistence of, 74; post-dictatorial memory, 19; song and, 125; spaces and, 66–67;

kissing, 124 Kissinger, Henry, 26 Klee, Paul, 62 Labanyi, Jo, 23, 31; on desencanto, 34; on discrepancies, 58; on haunting, 40 LaCapra, Dominic, 57; on acting out, 88 Lafourcade, Enrique, 68 Lagos, Ricardo, 35, 53, 75n2 languages, 51 El lápiz del carpintero (Rivas), 41–42 Latin, 114 Lázaro, Emilio Martínez, 42 Lazzara, Michael, 26, 38, 85; on exile, 69; on imagery, 40; on reflection, 189 El lector de Julio Verne (Grandes), 28, 49 leftwing nostalgia, 27 Leggott, Sarah, 143 Lemebel, Pedro, 45; allusion to, 47 Léon, María Teresa, 145 letters, 130, 150 Liberation Theology, 26 Lindhard, Tabea Alexa, 191 Linville, Rachel, 44 literature, 166; emotion and, 136 Llamazares, Gaspar, 143 Lodge, David, 165 longing, 55, 106; dual longing, 97; historical awakening and, 58–63;

216

Index

transgenerational communication and, 93; transnational redress and, 31–32; traumatic memories, 56. See also postmemory memory activism, 32 memory culture, 37 memory work, 37–38; contradictions and, 46; texts and, 9 men, 134 metaphor, 93; allusion and, 72; for storytelling, 113 militancy: motherhood and, 77–94; structures of, 79 military, 18; militaristic culture, 102 military dictatorships, 1 MIR. See Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria; Revolutionary Left Movement misogyny, 105, 148; normalization of, 105; representation and, 147 modernism, 14 modernization, 54; individualism and, 55 modes: of memory, 41–42; of storytelling, 103 Mohanty, Chandra, 22 Moix, Ana María, 155 Mooney, Pieper, 86 morality, 123, 161 Mossos d’Esquadra, 111 motherhood, 107, 152; absence and, 110; militancy and, 77–94 Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, 78 Moulian, Tomás, 54 movements, 88; grassroots, 93; women’s movement, 35 Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), 47, 77; daughters of, 90–91; Operación Retorno and, 92 Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, 30 music, 30; perspective and, 115. See also song myth, 62, 133; Greek mythology, 61; mythologization and, 85; narrative and, 103; self-acclaiming, 70; unmaking of, 183–184 The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus), 61

narratives, 5, 20, 73; allusion and, 103; construction of, 111; contrast of, 104; of experience, 19; goals of, 103; hegemony and, 14–15; heroism and, 155; oral narrative, 59; position and, 98; reception of, 51; self-consciousness and, 16 Narratives of Nostalgia, Gender and Nationalism anthology, 23 narrators, 134; reflection and, 63 Nash, Mary, 118 National-Catholic apparatus, 109, 149 nationalism, 23 neighborhood, 103 Nelson, Alice, 98 neo-fascism, 27; poetry and, 50 neoliberalism, 64, 84; neoliberal capitalism and, 5, 55 Neruda, Pablo, 3 nostalgia, 8; conceptualization of, 11–51; contemporary nostalgia, 31; contrast between, 50; cultural production and, 31; disenchantment and, 34–36; documentary and, 80–81; emotion and, 7; escapism and, 56–57; exile and, 27–29; exposure and, 5; forms of, 136; gender and, 20–22, 77–94; idealization and, 122; inner exile and, 139–163; irony and, 165–185; mapping return of, 36–39; memory and, 20; modes of memory and, 41–42; perceptions and, 12; performance and, 57; postwar prison, 117–136; rejection of, 22; for Second Spanish Republic, 29, 144; as tool, 29–31, 135–136; value of, 74; Wilson on, 125, 129. See also specific types of nostalgia nostalgia critique, 39–41 nostalgic discourses, 19 nostalgic memory, 19, 124, 141–143 nostalgic models, 7 nostalgic perspectives, 140 nostalgic remembrance, 153 novels, 6, 141, 144; by Grandes, 49, 136; guerrillas in, 45 Nunca llegarás a nada (Benet), 71 objects, 102, 120; desire and, 147 O lapis do carpinteiro (Rivas), 18

Index Operación Retorno, 87, 90; MIR and, 92 oppression: context of, 124; gender norms and, 102 oral history, 86 oral narrative, 59 organizations, 3; control of, 77–78 palimpsests, 170–171; sites and, 113–115; tropes of, 66 Palomita blanca (Lafourcade), 68 passivity, 112 past, 56; Benjamin on the, 62; idealization of, 82; representation of, 123 patriarchy, 91, 151; violence and, 153 Patria y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty), 27 patriotism, 24 patterns, 87, 110, 119; opposition of, 134 Payne, Leigh, 41 Peña, Michelle, 51, 187–191 Penã Brea, José, 128 perceptions: nostalgia and, 12; restorative perceptions, 9 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 28 Pérez-Sánchez, Gema, 155 performance, 58; Butoh, 189; Eltit in, 73; nostalgia and, 57; representations and, 59 perspectives, 100; lack of, 122; music and, 115; nostalgic perspectives, 140 Pey, Victor, 2–5, 10n2 photographs, 114, 127; Castillo and, 83; heroism and, 174–179; postphotography age, 106; screenshots and, 85, 89, 93 Pickering, Jean, 23 Piñera, Sebastián, 84 pink tide, 33 Pinochet, Augusto, 16, 63; arrest of, 34, 38; Chile and, 22–27; Kissinger and, 26; in Spain, 26 Pinochet Regime (1973-1989), 6 plot, 129; subplot, 154 poetic nostalgia, 11–51 poetry, 28; censure of, 155; neo-fascism and, 50 policy, 65 political apathy, 22 political mobilization, 29–31

217

politics: desire and, 56; poetic nostalgia and, 11–51 Portales, Diego, 25, 65 post-dictatorial memory, 19 postmemory, 39, 99; experience and, 132; generations and, 99 postwar, 100; exploitation, 148; nostalgia and prison, 117–136; restorative nostalgia and, 118–123 poverty, 67 power, 63, 149; identity and, 147; media and, 106 present, 56 Preston, Paul, 2, 24, 35 prison: nostalgia and, 117–136; prison communities, 123–135; visits to, 109 prisoners, 120, 135; political prisoners, 98 process: historical, 140; of remembrance, 121 progeny, 26 programs, 25 Pronzato, Carlos, 2 property, 147 PSOE. See Spanish Socialist Workers Party PSUC. See Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia publications, 74 Pueyo, Albert, 103–104 Pueyo Jornet, Clara, 103–104 Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Pérez-Sánchez), 155 Quílez Esteve, Laia, 100 radical nostalgia, 133 Radstone, Susannah, 14, 191 Ramona Para Brigade, 85 Rangel, Cecilia Enjuto, 29 reclamation: of cultural continuity, 7; of identity, 122 reconciliation, 73 reconstructions, 44 re-contextualization, 100 redress, 115–116 reductive nostalgia, 15; mode of, 41, 42 reflection, 58; critical reflection, 41; Lazzara on, 189; narrators and, 63

218

Index

reflective nostalgia, 81; restorative nostalgia, 121 reflexive nostalgia, 12; restorative and, 13; stasis and, 13 refugees, 2 regimes, 4; environment of, 58; targets of, 80 regression, 74 regret, 88–89 rejection, 22, 153; of nostalgia, 22; of tenets, 26 relationships, 62; in context, 91; militancy and, 90–91; parent-child, 79; tensions in, 113 remembrance, 92; nostalgic remembrance, 153; process of, 121 Reminiscing as a Process of Social Construction (Meacham), 126 reparations, 40 representations, 21, 68, 122; of dictatorial rule, 121; of families, 153; guerrillas and, 45; in media, 24–25; misogyny and, 147; of past, 123; performance and, 59 Representing the Holocaust (LaCapra), 57 repression, 25, 97; sexuality and, 60; sites and, 114 resilience, 107; women and, 121 resistance, 98, 131; collective responsibility and, 50; interpretations of, 149; longing for, 1–9, 69–73, 81–86; women in, 78 respectability, 112 restorative nostalgia, 22–27, 28; Boym on, 68, 83; deterioration by, 25; discourse of, 70; mode of, 41, 42; postwar and, 118–123; reflective nostalgia, 121; reflexive nostalgia and, 13 The Rettig Report, 35 Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR), 27 Richard, Nelly, 85–86 risk, 89 Rites of Return (Hirsch and Miller), 43 Rivas, Manuel, 18, 120; El lápiz del carpintero, 41–42 Rodríguez Zapatero, José Luis, 122 Romeu Alfaro, Fernanda, 129, 130 Ryan, Lorraine, 147

sacrifice, 91, 112; faith and, 131 Salt in the Sand (Frazier), 60 Sarlo, Beatriz, 40 scandals, 38 screenshots, 85, 89, 93 Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939), 6; nostalgia for, 29, 144; proclamation of, 143 self-acclaiming myth, 70 self-consciousness, 74; narratives and, 16; remembrance acts as, 47 self-effacement, 68 Serrat, Joan Manuel, 30 sewing machines, 101–104, 107 sexism, 134; classism and, 149; racism and, 17 sexual exploitation, 147; prostitution and, 147–148 sexual identity, 60, 64 sexuality, 59, 154; agency for women in, 150–151, 154; liberation and, 60, 61; repression of, 60 shame, 13 silence, 71, 131; harm and, 91; invisibility and, 154 Silva, Emilio, 32 sites, 113–115 Smaill, Belinda, 21 Smith, Sidonie, 79 social activism, 93 society, 106 solidarity, 55, 97; transatlantic solidarity, 29–31; vindication of, 7 song, 30; women and, 124–125 sounds, 102, 107 spaces, 66–67 Spain, 97; Amnesty Law in, 32; comparison between Chile and, 16–20; disenchantment in, 37; Pinochet in, 26 Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), 2; historiography of, 118; nostalgia and exile after, 27–29; Republicans and, 117; stories from, 38 Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE), 32; members of, 188 speeches, 65; by Franco, 24 stasis, 13 State Repression and the Labors of Memory (Jelin), 133

Index statues, 33 stereotypes, 110, 118, 134–135 Stern, Steve, 59; on forgetting, 73–74 stories, 155; antihero and, 68; of longing, 18; Spanish Civil War, 38 storytelling, 103; metaphor for, 113 subjugation, 105, 148 surveillance, 104 survivors, 58; children of, 116; guilt and, 71; loss for, 84 symbolism, 69, 101–104; ghosts as, 40 Tannock, Stuart, 11, 57, 69 Tengo miedo torero (Lemebel), 45, 61 terminology, 15, 114; desencanto, 34; unsettling nostalgia as, 6, 16, 97 testimony, 49, 117, 129; distortion of, 132; about executions, 130 texts, 52n6, 120; anti-nostalgic, 36; memory work and, 9 Thatcher, Margaret, 32 Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin), 62 Thomas, Gwynn, 33, 35 tone, 68 trade, 65 transatlantic feminist perspective, 19 transatlantic solidarity, 29–31 transgenerational communication, 43; memory and, 93 transnational redress, 31–32 trauma, 4, 49; collective trauma, 14; haunting and, 39–41; Herman on, 69; loss and, 74; motherhood and, 107; traumatic memories, 56 Las trece rosas film, 42, 128 triggers, 11 tropes, 179–182; haunting as, 41, 59; palimpsests as, 66 Twilight Memories (Huyssen), 36 typeface, 106 Últimos días de la historia (Brodsky), 46–47; unsettling nostalgia in, 53–74 UNCTAD. See United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia (PSUC), 103

219

Unified Socialist Youth (Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas) (JSU), 42, 146, 150 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 64–65 unsettling nostalgia, 14–16; conceptualization of, 23; in De monstruos y faldas, 106–113; future and, 73–74; mode of, 41; terminology of, 6, 16, 97; in Últimos días de la historia, 53–74 utopia, 1, 119, 185; Fischer on, 42; Johns on, 44 The Valech Report, 35 values, 24, 124; as anti-fascist, 17; nostalgia and, 74; reinforcement of, 126 Ventas women’s prison, 44 victims, 40; commemoration of, 31 violence, 100; context of, 190; emergence of, 105; gendered violence, 104–105; patriarchy and, 153; systems of, 101 visibility, 189–191 voiceover, 107; Castillo in, 82–83 voices, 107, 152; depictions of, 17 von Kempelen, Wolfgang, 71–72 La voz dormida (Chacón), 49, 117–136; patterns in, 110 war, 38, 147; women and, 20. See also postwar Weld, Kirsten, 25 Whelan, Gerardo, 67 When Romance Ended (Hite), 53 Wieder, Carlos, 50 Wilde, Alexander, 38 Wilson, Janelle, 5, 11–12; on nostalgia, 125, 129 womanhood, 104, 108; ideal of, 118 women, 35, 128; experiences of, 101; in history, 118; inner exile for, 140; mobilization of, 77; participation of, 78, 86, 97, 151; political prisoners, 98; resilience and, 121; in resistance, 78; restrictions for, 48; role of, 67; sexual agency for, 150–151, 154; song and, 124–125; war and, 20; womanhood, 104, 108

220 Writing History, Writing Trauma (LaCapra), 57 Yearning for Yesterday (Davis), 12 Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis (The Mares of the Apocalypse) group, 61

Index Young, James, 94 Zalaquett, Cherie, 78 Zatlin, Phyllis, 139–140

About the Author

Lisa DiGiovanni is Associate Professor of Spanish Peninsular and Latin American Studies with a joint appointment in the Departments of Modern Languages and Cultures and Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College (USA). She is also affiliated faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching centers on representations of war and dictatorial violence in twentieth and twenty-first century Spain and Latin America. She focuses primarily on Spanish and Chilean narrative and film that render visible the multiple traumas related to state repression and militaristic culture. She has published in journals including Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Journal of Romance Studies, Periphērica: Journal of Social, Cultural, and Literary History, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, World Literature Today, Chasqui, and has contributed to the books The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture, Cinema and the State-Tortured Body, Memory-Nostalgia-Melancholy: Re-imagining Home in a Time of Mobility, and Gender and Violence in Iberian and Latin American Cinemas.

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