Psychoanalysis in Rivera Garza and Roncaglio, or, the 'nostalgic cannibalism of history'

• In Event: Mind and Spirit: Psychoanalysis and Spirituality in History, Literature, Photography

Abstract

In this presentation I look at two engagements with history through psychoanalysis: Cristina Rivera Garza’s Nadie me verá llorar (1999), in which patients experience the Mexican Revolution from the confines of a psychiatric hospital, and Santiago Roncagliolo’s Abril rojo (2006), in which a detective working twenty years later digs up the violent past of Peru’s Sendero Luminoso internal conflict. Both authors, but particularly Rivera Garza, are fascinated with psychoanalysis as a prime feature of high modernity. She has a sort of skeptical nostalgia for psychoanalysis clearly conditioned by Foucault, and she puts into practice what Claude Lévi-Strausse, in another context, called the “nostalgic cannibalism of history”. Her main character, who shares her skepticism toward psychoanalysis, paradoxically observes himself reacting to personal and national tragedies through the Freudian categories and paradigms he mistrusts. Rivera Garza thus postulates a sort of problematic afterlife of psychonalytic discourse. Roncagliolo does something similar when his main character finds himself living through a traumatic haunting by the war’s ghostly victims despite the fact that he himself does not operate within the Trauma paradigm. Both authors, in other words, examine how psychoanalytic discourse continues to condition our responses to violence and history. This talk obviously situates psychoanalysis as a historical feature of high modernity, identifying a clearly nostalgic strain among contemporary Latin American novelists. Simultaneously, it suggest that contemporary writers continue to be fascinated by the enduring resonances of psychonalysic discourse and its power to predict and produce our reactions to violent histories today.

Author

• Kent L Dickson, California Polytechnic University/ Pomona