Articulating the unspeakable: Expressions of silence in post-authoritarian literature and culture of the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay)

The periods of state terror in Argentina (1976–83), Chile (1973–90), and Uruguay (1972–1985) produced a legacy of silence embodied in missing persons, censorship, repressed memories and absent justice. Consequently, much of the artistic expression that emerges from these dictatorships incorporates silence and silencing both as a central theme and as a mode of expression. This study explores the way in which such silences manifest themselves in both text and context—not only how societal silence informs artistic representation, but also how artistic expressions of silence dialogue with the surrounding context of post-authoritarian societies. With special emphasis on the legacies of authoritarianism in Argentina, each chapter explores a different rendering of silence—silence as a powerful mode of expression, silence as a desperate void needing to be filled, and silence as a fundamentally ambiguous yet essential element of the post-authoritarian experience.; Chapter One examines silence's powerful potential. Employing theory about the ethics of representation and torture, the chapter considers the stoically silent victim seen in three torture plays, Eduardo Pavlovsky's Paso de dos, Mario Benedetti's Pedro y el capitán and La muerte y la doncella by Ariel Dorfman. Chapter Two responds to the impulse to combat the desperate silences left in the wake of disappearance. Sociological and Holocaust theories regarding the presence of absence inform a discussion about the disappeared subject seen in Juan José Saer's detective novel La pesquisa and Eric Stener Carlson's testimonial workI Remember Julia: Voices of the Disappeared . The ambiguous legacy of authoritarianism comes to the fore in Chapter Three, which explores repressed memories and secrets in Luisa Valenzuela's novel La travesía through the lens of Holocaust theory about witnessing. Finally, Chapter Four examines the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires to consider the role of silence in memorials to past horror. Through this variety of readings, the study argues that only works of literature and art that resist the urge to resolve the complex issues facing post-authoritarian societies can hope to rise to the ethical and epistemological challenges of representing the aftermath of historical horror.